DSD 


iAFGMO  HEABH 
JAPAN 


>^e'  ^/2&'iA& 


NOTE 

"Sofleha  no  Tsuru"  (Heron  With  Wings  Down)  on 
the  cover  is  the  coat-of-arms  of  the  Hearn  family;  I 
believe  Mr.  Hearn  selected  it  from  the  reason  of  like 
sound  with  heron  as  I  heard  from  Mrs.  Hearn  that  he 
used  to  pronounce  his  name  Her'un. 


By  the  same  writer — 

Seen  and  Unseen 
The  Voice  of  the  Valley 
From  the  Eastern  Sea 
The  Pilgrimage 


LAFCADIO  HEARN  IN  JAPAN 


* 


•V-- 

1     V 

<^l 

\  \ 


A 


lafcaflio  Beam  in  Japan 


YOKE  NOGUCHI 


Lecturer  on  English  Literature  in 
Keio  University,  Tokyo 


With  Mrs.  Lafcadio  Hearn's 
Reminiscences 


Frontispiece  by  Shoshu  Saito 

with  sketches  by  Genjiro  Kataoka 

and  Mr.  Hearn  himself 


2  EAST  29TH  STREET 

MITCHELL  KENNERLCY 

New  York 


VIGO  STREET  YOKOHAMA 

ELKIN  MATHEWS    KELLY  &  WALSH 

London  Japan 

1911 


*«**: 


KAMAKURA 

THE  VALLEY  PRESS 
Japan 


To 

CAPTAIN  MITCHELL  MCDONALD 
U.  S.  N. 

who  was  Hearn's  first  and  last  friend 
in  Japan. 


774,535 


PREFACE 

AS  Lafcadio  Hearn  remarked,  or  as  any  broad, 
sympathetic  mind  is  pleased  to  believe,  a  man 
should  be  judged  through  his  strength  and  conviction. 
This  book,  "Lafcadio  Hearn  in  Japan,"  is  our  Japanese 
appreciation;  we  observed  him  under  many  different 
shades,  but  our  appreciation  of  his  art,  and  also  o.f  him 
as  a  man — unique  in  character  doubtless,  sincere  even 
to  a  fault, — and  as  a  professor  in  our  Imperial  Univer 
sity,  is  uniform,  I  think,  through  every  chapter. 
Where  you  will  find  a  frequent  repetition  in  the  book 
is  the  exact  place  we  wish  to  emphasize  ;  and  if  the 
book  appears  to  lack  a  certain  unity,  I  will  say  that  it 
was  not  my  intention  to  write  a  biography. 

I  have  often  heard  that  the  reliability  of  Hearn's 
Japanese  books  was  doubted  in  a  certain  quarter  as  he 
could  not  read  or  even  speak  well  the  Japanese  lan 
guage.  I  say  here  once  for  all  that  his  books  have  not 
even  one  misspelling  of  a  Japanese  word  which  is 
luxury  more  than  a  mere  delight  to  our  mind  nowadays, 
when  so  many  unwished-for  Japanese  books  overflow. 
He  had  Mr.  Otani,  and  many  other  Japanese  as  his 
literary  assistants  for  some  time,  and  Mrs.  Hearn  all  the 
time  as  an  inspiration ;  and  his  ignorance  of  Japanese 
letters  and  language  proved,  on  his  part,  to  be  a  perfect 


vi  Preface 

blessing,  keeping  him  aloof  from  the  trivialism  of  our 
modern  Japanese  life  which  is,  I  say,  quite  appalling. 
While  we  Japanese  are  bound  often  to  be  disenchanted 
and  pessimistic,  he  alone  could  look  upon  Japan  with 
an  ever  fresh  mind ;  and  Japan  appeared  to  him 
the  most  magical  land  of  the  world.  He  wore  the 
spectacles  of  romance  by  choice  and  temperament.  It 
was  good  for  him,  of  course,  and  also  for  Japan  herself. 
It  seems  to  me  there  are  few  writers  who  have  turned 
their  material  to  such  good  account  as  did  Hearn  when 
he  used  his  materials,  whatever  he  got,  which  in  fact 
are  not  wonderful  at  all  to  a  Japanese ;  in  truth,  he  did 
achieve  far  more  than  one  could  expect.  As  he  soared 
above  the  Japanese  triavialism,  so  he  could  serenely 
work  out  his  writing,  not  disillusioned  in  the  least,  and 
always  with  the  most  forcible  intention.  It  was  the 
heavenly  gift  of  his  ignorance  of  the  Japanese  language 
and  letters. 

It  is  a  matter  of  opinion  whether  he  were  fortunate 
or  unfortunate  as  a  writer.  It  is  a  fact  that  he  earned 
enough  materially  to  support  his  own  family  by  teach 
ing  in  a  Japanese  school ;  and  it  was,  to  be  sure,  his 
rare  luck  that  he  could  pursue  his  beloved  art  after  his 
own  impulse,  not  after  public  demand.  And  he  had 
twice  a  great  occasion  to  bring  himself  close  to  the 
public,  however  indirectly.  The  first  opportunity  came 
to  him  in  the  form  of  the  China- Japan  war.  And  the 
Russo- Japan  war  was  the  other,  ten  times  greater  than 


Preface  vii 

the  first.  I  believe  that  such  opportunities  do  not 
often  fall  to  the  lot  of  a  writer  of  the  type  of  Lafcadio 
Hearn. 

I  have  been  often  asked  about  our  real  Japanese 
opinion  on  Mr.  Hearn  ;  and  this  book  is  the  reply  to  a 
person  who  might  ask  it.  And  no  word  of  apology  is 
necessary,  I  think,  for  its  existence. 

And  I  feel  justified  in  reprinting  my  letter,  "A 
Japanese  Defence  of  Lafcadio  Hearn,"  which  was 
printed  in  the  Sun,  New  York,  and  the  Japan  Times, 
Tokyo,  when  Dr.  Gould's  book  appeared  a  few  years 
ago,  because  Hearn  might  have,  as  I  believe,  another 
Dr.  Gould  in  the  future,  and  the  letter  tells  for  once 
and  all,  the  general  attitude  we  Japanese  are  glad  to 
hold.  I  thank  the  editors  of  the  Atlantic  Monthly 
for  "A  Japanese  Appreciation  of  Lafcadio  Hearn,"  for 
their  permission  to  use  it  again  in  this  book. 

I  thank  Mrs.  Hearn  for  her  collaboration,  and  also 
Messrs.  Otani,  Osanai  and  Uchigasaki  for  their  kind 
assistance. 

k 

ura,  Japan. 
June  19,  1910. 


CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Preface v 

A  Japanese  Appreciation  of  Lafcadio  Hearn.  i 
A  Japanese  Defence  of  Lafcadio  Hearn  .  .  19 
Mrs.  Lafcadio  Hearn's  Reminiscences  ...  31 

Lafcadio  Hearn  at  Yaidzu 80 

Mr.  Otani  as  Hearn's  Literary  Assistant  .  .105 
Lafcadio  Hearn  in  His  Lecture  Room  .  .  .125 

APPENDIX 

On    Romantic   and   Classic    Literature   in 

Relation  to  Style 1 49 

Farewell  Address 170 


ILLUSTRATION 

Frontispiece,  drawn  by  Shoshu  Saito 
Where  Hearn  is  Enshrined  ;  the   Household 

Shrine      .     .*    ."  T'  .     .  "*.     .     .     .     35 

A  Letter  Written  by  Hearn  to  His  Wife  .     . 

.     .      to  face  p.     46 

Hearn's  Method  of  Illustrating     .      to  face  p.     $2 
Drawing  by  Hearn  for  His  Son,  Kazuo     .     . 

to  face  p.     90 

Hearn's  Rooms  at  Otokichi's 92 

Hearn' s   Favorite    Nook    in   the    University 

Ground ,     .      to  face  p.   138 


LAFCADIO  HEARN 
IN  JAPAN 


A  JAPANESE  APPRECIATION  OF 
LAFCADIO  HEARN 

To  my  visionary  eyes  appear  simultaneously 
the  two  half-nocturnal  figures,  Lafcadio  Hearn 
and  Akinari  Uyeda  (who  died  on  the  sixth  of 
Bunkwa,  that  is,  in  1810),  shining  sad,  yet  stead 
fast,  like  two  silver  stars,  each  in  his  own  shrine 
of  solitude.  The  former's  allegiance  to  the  latter 
was  expressed  by  his  translation  of  the  two  stories 
from  Uyeda's  Ugetsu  Monogatari,  "  Kikka  no 
Yaku,"  or  "  Of  a  Promise  Kept,"  and  "  Muwo  no 
Rigio,"  or  "  The  Story  of  Kogi,  the  Priest,"  in  A 
Japanese  Miscellany. 

The  gray-colored  .  region  of  solitude  was  a 
triumph  for  them,  not  a  defeat,  by  any  means  ; 
they  found  life  in  silence,  and  a  ghost's  virtue  in 
shadow  and  whisper.  They  slowly  walked  fol 
lowing  after  a  beckoning  hand,  half  vision,  half 


2  Lafcadio  Hearn  in  Japan 

reality ;  they  placed  their  single-minded  con 
fidence  on  the  dream-breast  of  spirit.  The  world 
and  people  they  wished  and  tried  to  elude,  these 
were  for  them  too  physical  altogether.  However, 
Uyeda's  hatred  of  the  people  and  the  world  was 
not  so  sharp-tongued  as  Hearn's  ;  it  may  be  from 
the  reason  that  a  hundred  years  ago,  in  Japan  as 
in  other  countries,  the  impression  received  from 
the  times  was  not  so  vulgar  and  bold  as  to-day, 
and  the  interruptions  which  pass  nowadays  under 
the  hypocritical  name  of  sociableness  did  not  flap 
in  the  air  so  wantonly. 

Uyeda  wrote  a  sort  of  Zuihitsu  ("  Following 
the  Pen  ")  of  his  own  life,  or  confession  called 
Tandai  Skoshin  Roku ;  and  he  remarked  some 
where  in  it :  "I  am  keeping  my  life  which  I  do 
not  particularly  value,  by  eating  barley,  and 
drinking  hot  water  with  parched  rice  steeped  in  it 
I  lived  some  twelve  or  thirteen  years  with  money 
which  I  received  from  a  publisher,  now  ten  ryos 
and  then  fifteen  ryos .  But  as  I  can  do  nothing 
now,  I  have  only  to  wait  for  my  own  death,  and 
in  the  meantime  I  drink  boiled  tea."  Tea  was 
his  favorite,  while  sake,  tobacco  (though  these 
two  Hearn  liked,  tobacco  in  particular  being  his 
passion),  literary  men,  and  rich  men,  were  the 


Appreciation  of  Hearn 


four  things  he  bitterly  despised.  And  he  lived  to 
the  good  old  age  of  seventy-eight.  I  always 
think,  for  more  than  one  reason,  that  Hearn 
would  have  been  another  Akinari  Uyeda,  if  he 
had  been  born  in  Japan  a  century  ago ;  the 
difference  between  them,  it  seems  to  me,  is  the 
difference  of  age  and  circumstances.  It  was  a  co 
incidence,  however,  that  their  lives  were  unhappy 
from  childhood.  Uyeda  was  left  an  orphan,  being 
the  son  of  &  geisha,  and  like  Hearn  he  was  obliged 
to  undergo  the  baptism  of  tears.  It  might  be  said 
to  be  due  to  the  kindness  of  this  age  that  Hearn 
was  brought  over  the  Pacific  to  seek  his  kingdom 
of  beauty.  Indeed,  a  Columbus  has  to  sail  west 
— is  it  east  ? — for  his  ideal  as  for  the  sun.  It  was 
fortunate  for  Japan  that  she  had  him  when  she 
needed  such  a  one  ;  and  Hearn  too  reached  Japan 
just  at  the  right  time.  Poor  Akinari  had  no  west 
to  sail  to,  and  had  to  bury  himself  in  his  little  tea 
house,  very  often  to  curse  the  people,  and  some 
times  to  invite  some  angel  or  god  to  sip  tea  with 
him  and  forget  the  world. 

Hearn  ended  his  "  Horai "  in  the  book  of 
Kwaidan  thus  : — 

"  Evil  winds  from  the  west  are  blowing  over 
Horai ;  and  the  magical  atmosphere,  alas !  is 


4          Lafcadio  Hearn  in  Japan 

shrinking  away  before  them.  It  lingers  now  in 
patches  only,  and  bands, — like  those  long  bright 
bands  of  cloud  that  trail  across  the  landscapes  of 
Japanese  painters.  Under  these  shreds  of  the 
elfish  vapor  you  still  can  find  Horai — but  not  else 
where.  .  .  .  Remember  that  Horai  is  also 
called  Shinkiro,  which  signifies  Mirage,  —  the 
Vision  is  the  Intangible.  And  the  Vision  is 
fading, — never  again  to  appear  save  in  pictures 
and  poems  and  dreams." 

His  Horai  —  where  the  shadows  of  splendor 
strange  and  old  deepened  under  the  sunlight  sad 
like  memory,  and  the  milky  vision  hung  like  an 
immense  spider-web,  and  shivered  like  a  ghost, 
and  the  sadness  and  joy  of  the  souls  of  thousands 
on  thousands  of  years  blended  into  an  infinite  waste 
of  song — vanished  at  once  when,  in  1 896,  he  left 
Old  Japan  in  Izumo  (the  place  of  his  love  first 
and  last),  and  even  in  Kumamoto,  for  Tokyo, 
which  he  hated  to  the  utmost  degree. 

Suppose  fate  had  not  brought  him  to  Tokyo  ? 
I  have,  however,  a  reason  or  two  for  saying  that 
this  city  of  horrid  impression,  too,  did  for  him  no 
small  service ;  indeed,  the  greatest  service,  as  I 
dare  say,  which  marked  his  work  distinctly,  al 
though  he  did  not  notice  it,  as  it  seemed,  and  even 


Appreciation  of  Hearn 


thought  the  reverse.  Old  Japan  of  the  province 
shook  his  frail  body  terribly  with  the  might  of 
charm,  and  his  extreme  sensitiveness  made  him 
uneasy,  and  even  doubtful  of  his  qualification  to 
see  Japan  with  a  Japanese  mind,  as  he  prayed. 
It  is  true  that  his  foreign  origin  flickered  as  a 
broken  smoke,  at  his  desire  to  be  changed  into  a 
a  Japanese.  He  was  more  restless,  in  fact,  when 
he  was  more  impressed  by  Old  Japan.  But  one 
day,  coming  to  Tokyo, — where  the  old  faith  and 
beauty,  which  grew  marvelously  from  the  ground 
like  a  blossoming  cherry-tree  through  the  spring 
mist,  had  tottered  and  even  fallen,  and  the  people 
chose  foreign  things  and  thoughts  ("  Carpets — • 
pianos  —  windows  —  curtains  —  brass  bands  — 
churches  !  How  I  hate  them !  !  And  white 
shirts  !  —  and  yofuku  !  "  Hearn  wrote  to  his 
friend), — he  at  once  awoke  to  the  recognition  of 
liis  own  worth,  and  began  to  believe  himself  more 
Japanese  than  any  other  Japanese.  And  it  gave 
him  a  great  confidence  in  himself  which  he  could 
not  dare  claim  before  ;  and  that  confidence  gave 
to  his  later  work  the  deliberation  strange  and 
positive,  and  the  translucence  milky  and  soft. 
And  it  spoke  in  perfect  accord  with  the  sweet 
glamour  of  Old  Japan,  where  the  sea  of  reality 


6          Lafcadio  Hearn  in  Japan 

and  the  sky  of  vision  melted  into  one  blue  eternity, 
— the  land  of  ghosts. 

I,  as  a  Japanese,  have  to  oppose  those  who 
will  rate  first  the  enthusiasm  and  fire  of  his 
earlier  work ;  it  is  true  that  it  had  them,  but 
they  were  so  scattered,  and  often  too  free. 
His  spendthrift  habit  in  thought  and  art  went 
too  far,  frequently,  even  for  us.  And  remember 
that  we  are  rather  spoiled  children  only  too 
glad  to  be  admired.  I  believe  that  in  his  later 
work  shone  his  golden  light  which  was  old  as 
a  spring  in  Horai ;  its  slowness  was  poetry,  and 
its  reticence  was  a  blessing.  However,  he  wrote 
to  his  friend  from  •"  Tokyo,  this  detestable 
Tokyo  "  :  "  To  think  of  art  or  time  or  eternity  in 
the  dead  waste  and  muddle  of  this  mass  is  difficult. 
The  Holy  Ghost  of  the  poets  is  not  in  Tokyo.  . 
.  .  In  tkis  horrid  Tokyo  I  feel  like  a  cicada  : — 
I  am  caged,  and  can't  sing.  Sometimes  I  wonder 
whether  I  shall  ever  be  able  to  sing  any  more, — 
except  at  night? — like  a  bell-insect  which  has 
only  one  note."  Are  we  not  glad  to  have  him 
singing  his  one  real  Japanese  note  of  a  bell-insect 
of  night  in  his  later  work  ?  He  must  have  noticed 
himself,  I  am  sure,  after  he  had  written  such  a 
letter,  that  he  was  wrong,  and  I  believe  that 


Appreciation  of  Hearn 


he  must  have  been  more  pleased  in  not  re 
ceiving  any  inspiration  from  without,  because  his 
own  soul  would  find  it  easier  to  shine  out  from 
within,  as  a  pearl  of  five  colors  or  a  firefly  with  a 
lyrical  flash.  He  threw  the  world  and  people  out, 
and  shut  himself  in  his  own  sanctum,  as  you  have 
to  close  the  shojis  after  you  have  burned  incense 
to  keep  its  odor.  Indeed  he  had  the  most  lovely 
incense  of  love  with  Old  Japan  which  he  had  to  pro 
tect  from  the  evil  winds  ;  and  he  was  afraid  that 
the  magical  atmosphere  of  his  vision  might  be  dis- 
disturbed.  His  only  desire  was  to  be  left  alone 
with  the  dreams  of  his  Horai ;  and  the  dreams 
themselves  were  ghosts,  under  whose  spell  he 
wove  the  silvery  threads  of  the  Ideal,  and  wrote 
the  books  with  a  strange  thrill  which  nobody  else 
could  ever  feel. 

He  left  some  eight  books  that  were  written  even 
after  he  settled  in  Tokyo ;  they  were  the  ut 
most  that  could  be  expected  of  him,  and  perhaps 
he  pressed  himself  too  harshly  to  produce 
them.  I  know  that  writing  for  him  was  no  light 
work ;  he  wrote  the  books  with  life  and  blood, 
a  monument  builded  by  his  own  hands.  He 
was  like  a  cuckoo  which  is  said  to  die  spitting 
blood  and  song.  Like  incense  before  the  Bud- 


8          Lafcadio  Hearn  in  Japan 


dhist  altar,  which  had  to  burn  itself  up,  he  passed 
away. 

It  was  entirely  proper  for  Hearn  to  break  away 
from  any  social  organization  ("a  proof  of  weak 
ness — not  a  combination  of  force,"  to  quote  his 
words)  where  one's  poor  little  time  is  foolishly 
wasted,  and  to  build  for  himself  a  castle  of 
solitude  and  silence  where  nobody  should  be 
admitted.  Indeed,  life  was  too  short  for  him,  as 
"  literature  was  a  very  serious  and  sacred  thing, 
— not  an  amusement,  not  a  thing  to  trifle  and 
play  with."  I  agree  with  him  when  he  wrote  to 
a  friend  :  "  My  friends  are  much  more  dangerous 
than  my  enemies.  These  latter— with  infinite 
subtlety — spin  webs  to  keep  me  out  of  places 
where  I  hate  to  go.  ...  and  they  help  me 
so  much  by  their  unconscious  aid  that  I  almost 
love  them.  They  help  me  to  maintain  the  isola 
tion  absolutely  essential  to  thinking.  .  .  . 
Blessed  be  my  enemies,  and  forever  honored  all 
them  that  hate  me  !  "  And  it  will  make  the 
reason  clear  why  he  broke  away  from  his  friends 
of  former  days,  and  bolted  his  door  right  against 
their  faces.  Almost  nobody  was  admitted  in  his 
home  in  his  last  days.  It  seems  to  me,  however, 
to  have  been  a  piece  of  cruelty  on  Hearn's  part 


Appreciation  of  Hearn 


that  Masanobu  Otani,  one  of  his  students  of  the 
Matsue  days,  and  his  literary  secretary  in  later 
years,  who  helped  in  furnishing  material  for  his 
books,  could  not  also  have  been  made  an  excep 
tion.  And  it  is  said  that  only  upon  their  third 
call  did  Hearn  admit  the  representatives  of  the 
literature  classes  of  the  university,  who  wanted  his 
own  opinion  before  they  could  properly  appeal  to 
the  president  to  allow  Hearn  to  stay  with  them 
in  the  university. 

The  university  students  uttered  a  deep  lamen 
tation  when  he  was  asked  to  resign.  His  dis 
tinguished  personality,  expressed  through  the 
emotional  beauty  of  English  literature,  impressed 
their  minds  tenderly  yet  forcefully.  It  was  their 
delight  to  see  his  somewhat  bending  body,  under 
an  old,  large-rimmed  soft  hat  like  that  of  a 
Korean,  carrying  his  heavy  books,  wrapped  in  a 
purple  furushiki.  He  never  entered  the  professors' 
room,  but  walked  slowly  and  meditatively  by  the 
lake  of  the  university  garden,  and  often  sat  on  a 
stone  by  the  water,  and  smoked  a  Japanese 
natamame  pipe.  The  students  did  not  dare  to 
come  nearer  to  him  for  fear  lest  they  might  dis 
turb  his  solitude,  but  admired  him  from  a  distance 
as  if  he  were  some  old  china  vase  which  might  be 


io        Lafcadio  Hearn  in  Japan 

broken  even  by  a  single  touch.  But  it  was  al 
most  amazing  to  hear  his  clear  and  unreserved 
voice  in  the  class-room,  which  made  the  students 
at  once  feel  quite  at  home.  I  believe  that  he 
was  not  an  unsociable  man  originally,  but  he 
valued  his  work  as  more  important.  And  it  may 
be  that  the  students  did  not  disturb  him  much; 
or,  perhaps,  his  foreign  blood  gave  him  a  strong 
feeling  of  responsibility  so  that  he  tried  not  to 
look  unhappy  and  selfish.  He  was  eloquent,  it 
is  said,  and  he  never  used  any  note-book,  as  his 
beautiful  language  of  appreciation  was  left  to  flow 
out  from  his  heart  upon  an  author  whom  he 
happened  to  speak  of.  Not  long  ago,  I  had  a 
chance  to  see  a  note-book  of  Kaworu  Osanai,  one 
of  his  former  students  in  the  university,  and  to-day 
one  of  the  younger  novelists,  in  which  I  read  his 
verbal  beauty.  To  show  his  art  in  the  class-room, 
let  me  copy  out  his  language  of  paraphrase  for 
"Was  never  voice  of  ours  could  say,"  etc.,  of 
Geoge  Meredith's  poem  on  the  lark  : — 

"  There  never  was  a  human  poet  in  our  world 
which  could  speak  the  innermost  thoughts  of  the 
human  heart  in  the  most  beautiful  way  possible — 
as  that  bird  speaks  all  its  heart  in  the  sweetest 
possible  manner.  And  even  if  there  were  such  a 


Appreciation  of  Hearn  n 

human  voice,  it  would  not  be  able  to  speak  to  all 
hearts  alike  —  as  that  bird  can.  For  wisdom 
comes  to  us,  poor  human  beings,  only  when  we 
are  getting  old — when  our  blood  is  growing  chill, 
and  when  we  do  not  care  to  sing.  On  the  other 
hand,  in  the  time  of  our  youth,  when  we  want 
to  sing — want  to  write  beautiful  poetry  —  then 
we  are  too  impulsive,  too  passionate,  too  selfish, 
to  sing  a  perfect  song.  We  think  too  much  about 
ourselves ;  and  that  makes  us  insincere.  But 
there  is  no  insincerity  in  that  bird. — Oh  !  if  we 
could  but  utter  the  truth  of  our  heart  as  he  can  ! 
There  is  no  selfishness  in  the  song  of  that  bird, 
nothing  of  individual  desire  :  such  a  song  is  indeed 
like  the  song  of  a  Seraph,  the  highest  of  angels 
— so  pure  is  it,  so  untouched  by  the  least  personal 
quality.  Only  such  an  impersonal  song  is  indeed 
suited  to  express  the  gratitude  of  all  life  to  that 
great  Giver  of  Life — the  sun.  And  that  is  just 
what  that  song  does  express — one  voice  speaking 
for  millions  of  creatures — and  no  one  of  all  those 
millions  feeling  in  the  least  envious  of  the  singer, 
but  all,  on  the  contrary,  loving  him  for  uttering 
their  joy  of  heart  well." 

He  may  not  have  been  a  Buddhist  believer  be 
fore  he  came  to  Japan,  but  certainly  he  was  not 


12         Lafcadio  Hearn  in  Japan 

of  the  Christian  faith.  Here,  before  me,  I  have 
his  criticism  on  Mr.  Otani's  school  composition 
called  The  Book,  made  when  Hearn  was  a  teach 
er  at  Matsue.  In  it  he  attempts  to  tell  his  non- 
Christian  argument  to  his  student.  It  may  be 
due  to  his  Greek  blood  that  his  passion  for  b.  auty 
accepted  unconditionally  a  sort  of  pantheism 
which  led  him  straight  into  the  inner  temple  of 
Buddhism  afterward  in  Japan,  and  made  him 
glad  to  find  a  thousand  beauties  and  symbols 
again  which  he  had  lost  a  long,  long  time  ago, 
and  of  which  ever  since  he  had  been  dreaming, 
without  any  clear  thought  of  their  real  existence. 
To  call  him  primitive,  as  one  might  wish  to  say 
of  him,  does  not  mean  that  he  was  undeveloped, 
but  on  the  contrary,  his  soul  was  a  thousand 
years  old.  Primitiveness  was  strength  in  him ; 
and  the  wonder  about  him  was  how  he  succeeded 
in  remaining  primitive  under  such  an  age's 
intrusion  of  knowledge.  I  am  sure  that  his  belief 
may  have  been  shuffled  sometimes  by  an  evil 
wind  ("  Evil  winds  from  the  West "  in  his 
"Horai"),  but  it  was  fortunate  for  him  that  Spencer 
brought  him  back  to  his  original  serenity.  Not 
from  only  one  reason  can  I  say  that  he  made  the 
East  and  West  meet  and  exchange  their  courtesies. 


Appreciation  of  Hearn  13 

He  understood  Buddhism  through  beauty's  eye  ; 
the  Buddha  idol  appeared  to  him  to  be  a  symbol 
of  love  and  beauty ;  and  for  him,  truth  and  faith 
came  afterward.  His  being  of  an  objective 
temperament  made  it  easy  for  him  to  enter  into 
the  ideal  of  Buddhistic  art  of  Mahayana  (Greater 
Vehicle).  But  I  am  ready  even  to  speculate  that, 
if  he  could  have  lived  longer,  his  mind  would  have 
turned  to  the  subjective  meditation  of  the  Shodo 
Buddhism  like  that  of  Rinzai  or  Soto  or  Nichiren; 
and  I  am  told  that  he  was  planning  to  study 
Buddhism  more  deeply  under  the  guidance  of 
Dr.  Murakami,  when  he  died.  It  is  not  necessary 
here  to  try  to  fathom  his  belief ;  it  is  beautiful  to 
read  his  lyrical  conception  of  the  world  and  life 
which  he  sang  in  his  own  Buddhist  temple.  He 
is  not  only  one  who  has  been  glad  to  believe  in 
the  mystery  of  rebirth  and  ghosts,  and  it  is  quite 
natural  to  believe  in  them  in  Japan  where,  as 
he  wrote  to  his  friend,  "  is  a  domesticated  Nature, 
which  loves  man,  and  makes  itself  beautiful  for 
him  in  a  quiet  grey-and-blue  way  like  the  Japa 
nese  women,  and  the  trees  seem  to  know  what 
people  say  about  them,  —  seem  to  have  little 
human  souls."  He  laughed  with  the  flowers  and 
birds,  and  he  cried  with  the  dying  trees. 


14        Lafcadio  Hearn  in  Japan 

To-day  I  turned  to  the  book  of  my  old  diary, 
wherein  I  read  my  conversation  with  Mrs.  Hearn 
which  I  had  two  or  three  days  after  Hearn 's 
funeral.  Let  me  copy  out  some  part  of  it : — 

"  Mrs.  Koizumi,  your  gardeners  were  moving 
away  some  of  your  garden  trees.  One  of  them 
told  me  that  those  trees  were  for  his  graveyard. 
Is  it  true?"  I  asked  her. 

"  Oh  !  yes,  Mr.  Noguchi.  He  used  to  say  that 
he  could  not  live  without  trees.  He  had  a  strong 
passion  for  trees  and  flowers. 

"  I  am  trying  to  please  him  or  his  spirit,  by 
moving  some  of  them  to  his  Zoshigaya  cemetery, 
— some  of  his  favorite  trees.  He  loved  the  fir 
tree  best,  and  also  the  bamboo.  He  was  fond  of 
the  Oranda  Genge  (a  sort  of  violet).  I  am  hoping 
to  have  a  green  moss  cover  the  ground  yard,  since 
he  was  devoted  to  it.  How  he  loved  to  touch  the 
soft  velvety  moss.  However,  he  was  never 
pleased  to  break  anything  when  it  was  complete. 
I  thought  at  first  he  would  not  wish  me  to  destroy 
the  garden  by  taking  off  some  trees,  even  for  him. 
But  it  was  my  second  thought  that  told  me  he 
would  rather  wish  to  have  the  trees  and  flowers 
familiar  for  many  years  than  to  have  newly 
bought  trees  and  flowers.  So  my  gardeners  have 


Appreciation  of  Hearn  15 

begun  their  work.  You  cannot  imagine  how  he 
loved  trees.  There  was  one  high  cedar  tree  in 
the  front  garden  of  the  Kobutera  (his  favorite 
temple).  Some  months  ago  the  priests  cut  it 
down.  '  What  cruelty  !  '  he  cried.  '  I  feel  as 
if  my  own  arm  were  cut  off.  I  shall  never  go 
there  again  ' ;  and  never  again  did  he  turn  his 
steps  toward  his  beloved  temple." 

It  amuses  me  to  read  one  of  his  earliest  letters 
from  Japan,  that  said  :  "  Pretty  to  talk  of  my 
'pen  of  fire/  I've  lost  it.  Well,  the  fact  is,  it 
is  no  use  here.  There  isn't  any  fire  here.  It  is 
all  soft,  dreamy,  quiet,  pale,  faint,  gentle,  hazy, 
vapory,  visionary — a  land  where  lotus  is  a  com 
mon  article  of  diet — and  where  there  is  scarcely 
any  real  summer.  Even  the  seasons  are  feeble, 
ghostly  things.  Don't  please  imagine  there  are 
any  tropics  here.  Ah  !  the  tropics — they  still 
pull  at  my  heart-strings.  Goodness !  my  real 
field  was  there — in  the  Latin  countries,  in  the 
West  Indies  and  Spanish  America  :  and  my  dream 
was  to  haunt  the  old  crumbling  Portuguese  and 
Spanish  cities,  and  steam  up  the  Amazon  and 
the  Orinoco,  and  get  romances  nobody  else  could 
find.  And  I  could  have  done  it,  and  made 
books  that  would  sell  for  twenty  years." 


1 6        Lafcadio  Hearn  in  Japan 

He  must  be  pleased  now,  I  think,  since,  after 
all,  he  could  write  the  books  which  will  sell  as  long 
as  Japan  lives.  The  particulars  which  disappoint 
ed  him  at  first  were  nothing  but  Japan's  points 
of  beauty  and  distinction.  Any  artist  will  tell 
you  that  he  would  be  a  flat  failure  in  Japan  if 
he  could  not  use  the  bluish-gray  skillfully.  To 
understand  and  appreciate  this  land  of  azure, — 
this  land  of  shadow  and  whisper,  where  memory 
and  ghosts  live  as  a  living  soul,  —  would  take 
some  long  years  for  anybody  of  foreign  origin. 

Hearn  remarked  in  his  "  Azure  Psychology  " 
that  the  power  of  preceiving  blue  will  not  be 
acquired  until  after  the  power  of  distinguishing 
red  and  green  and  yellow  has  already  been 
gained.  I  believe  that  he  was  not  highly  ad 
vanced  in  his  aesthetic  perception,  when  he  found 
himself  first  in  Japan.  It  may  be  the  magic  and 
power  of  chance  that  he  got  married  to  a  Japa 
nese  woman  whose  "  gray-and-blue  bosom  "  was 
the  first  thing  he  had  to  understand ;  in  its 
sweetness  he  discovered  the  golden  key  to  open 
the  secret  of  Old  Japan  with  every  thrill  of  the 
delight  of  azure.  There  is  no  greater  apprecia 
tion  of  Japan  than  "  Azure  Psychology,"  in  his 
Exotics  and  Retrospectives  ;  when  he  found  some- 


Appreciation  of  Hearn  17 

thing  of  all  the  aspirations  of  the  ancient  faiths,  and 
the  power  of  the  vanished  gods,  and  the  passion 
and  the  beauty  of  all  the  prayer  ever  uttered  by 
lips  of  man  "  in  the  vision  of  luminous  blue  of 
Old  Japan,  I  say,  his  heart  thrilled  with  her 
real  life  of  emotion  and  mystery. 

We  Japanese  have  been  regenerated  by  his 
sudden  magic,  and  baptized  afresh  under  his 
transcendental  rapture ;  in  fact,  the  old  romances 
which  we  had  forgotten  ages  ago  were  brought 
again  to  quiver  in  the  air,  and  the  ancient  beauty 
which  we  buried  under  the  dust  rose  again  with 
a  strange  yet  new  splendor.  He  made  us  shake 
the  old  lobe  of  bias  which  we  wore  without 
knowing  it,  and  gave  us  a  sharp  sensation  of 
revival.  However,  what  impressed  us  most  was 
that  he  was  a  striking  figure  of  protest.  He 
wrote  to  Mr.  Otani :  "  While  this  rage  for  wast 
ing  time  in  societies  goes  on  there  will  be  no 
new  Japanese  literature,  no  new  drama,  no  new 
poetry — nothing  good  of  any  kind.  Production 
will  be  made  impossible,  and  only  the  common 
place  translation  of  foreign  ideas.  The  meaning 
of  time,  the  meaning  of  work,  the  sacredness  of 
literature,  are  unknown  to  this  generation."  He 
was,  indeed,  the  living  proof  of  the  power  of 


1 8        Lafcadio  Hearn  in  Japan 

solitude    with    which    he    tried    to    master  these 
problems,  and  with  which  he  succeeded. 

And  I  incline  to  predict  that  our  future  genera 
tion  will  be  glad  to  remember  him  as  the  writer 
of  the  "  Story  of  Miminashi-Hoichi,"  the  "Dream 
of  Akinosuke,"  and  others ;  behind  the  waving 
gossamer  of  those  little  stories  his  personality 
appears  and  disappears  as  the  shiver  of  a  ghost. 
As  Uyeda's  Ugetsu  Monogatari  influenced  the 
later  writers  like  Bakin  or  others,  so  Hearn's 
books  will  come  to  be  regarded  in  Japan  as 
a  sort  of  depth  of  inspiration. 


II 


A  JAPANESE  DEFENCE  OF 
LAFCADIO  HEARN 

BIOGRAPHY  is  a  kind  of  "  apology  "  at  best,  ana 
more  often  it  appears  when  it  is  not  called  for. 
We  are  led  usually  more  into  dark  than  into  light 
by  it,  and  are  bound  to  grope  under  it.  Certainly 
it  is  a  biographer's  bad  taste  to  force  on  us  his 
unsympathetic  opinion,  and  it  is  sad  to  read  the 
quick  operation  of  his  own  mind  reflected  in  his 
book.  It  is  true  that  we  see  more  of  Dr.  George 
M.  Gould  in  his  "  Concerning  Lafcadio  Hearn  "* 
than  of  Hearn  himself ;  it  is  really  a  pity,  I  dare 
say,  for  him  to  make  such  an  awful  exposure  of 
himself  through  Hearn.  It  does  harm  to  the 
author  himself,  while  not  helping  general  litera 
ture  whatever.  In  truth,  you  cannot  understand 
anything  more  than  you  are  worthy  to  understand  ; 

*  "Concerning  Lafcadio  Hearn"  published  by  George 
W.  Jacobs  and  Company,  Philadelphia,  1908  ;  also  published 
by  T.  Fisher  Unwin,  London,  1909. 


20        Lafcadio  Hearn  in  Japan 

Dr.  Gould  was  mistaken  to  think  that  sympathy 
is  cowardice ;  indeed,  narrow-mindedness  is  often 
taken  for  bravery.  After  all,  how  far  can  one 
man  understand  another  ?  You  must  have  another 
Hearn  to  understand  and  appreciate  Lafcadio 
Hearn.  And  what  a  difference  between  Hearn 
and  Dr.  Gould  !  He  has  no  right,  I  should  like 
to  say,  to  appear  as  Hearn's  biographer  ;  and  such 
a  book  as  he  has  published  cannot  dare,  I  think, 
to  justify  its  existence.  However,  I  do  not  mean 
that  his  book  is  outrageous  altogether ;  in  fact,  it 
gives  us  many  a  point  which  makes  us  reflect  and 
even  acknowledge  as  a  flash  of  truth.  I  always 
think  that  any  biographer  should  write  a  book 
which  he  could  publish  even  when  his  subject  still 
lives.  And  I  should  like  to  ask  Dr.  Gould  if  his 
book  is  such  a  biography.  I  have  not  a  few 
reasons  to  believe  that  his  book  is  not  only  a 
treason  against  Hearn  but  a  blasphemy  against 
literature.  Forgive  my  hot  words  !  His  denunci 
ation  of  Hearn  is  at  the  same  time  a  denunciation 
of  Japan  and  "  the  vapid  and  even  pitiful  childish 
ness  of  semi-barbaric  Orientalism "  as  he  said 
somewhere.  I,  as  a  Japanese,  cannot  accept  such 
words  in  silence.  (But  Hearn  is  now  in  the 
blessed  state  of  Death  where  silence  is  a  golden 


Defence  of  Hearn  21 

weapon  with  which  he  will  gracefully  conquer 
Dr.  Gould's  attack.  I  believe  he  will  soon  be 
sorry  for  his  book.)  I  ever  noticed  that  the  so- 
called  "  weaknesses  "  of  Hearn  which  are  said  to 
be  a  menace  to  society  and  life  in  the  West  are 
quite  often  but  the  beauty  and  even  strength  of 
the  East ;  and  it  is  the  part  of  kindness  to  see 
him  under  his  best  light.  It  would  be  still  kinder 
to  keep  silent  and  not  talk  about  his  "  worse 
self,"  supposing  he  had  it,  and  let  him  speak  for 
himself  with  his  own  books. 

I  believe  that  the  process  of  physiological 
psychology  is  not  a  proper  vehicle  of  art  for  any 
biographer ;  its  pointed  sharpness  following  all 
the  time  after  every  detail — how  much  does  detail 
count,  I  wonder — leaves  the  most  important  part 
of  the  general  effect  untouched.  And  you  will 
find  it  is  not  a  real  picture  at  all  when  it  is  done. 
I  see  a  similar  case  with  a  beginner's  art  always, 
which  goes  astray  into  a  maze  when  he  regards 
details  as  a  sole  guidance.  And  Hearn's  person 
ality  reminds  me  of  some  picture  which,  at  close 
hand,  might  appear  to  be  merely  a  dirty  mass  of 
paints,  but  from  a  little  distance  turns  to  be  an 
enchanting  picture  ;  he  may  have  been  impossible 
(he  had,  however,  every  reason  to  act  impossible 


22         Lafcadio  Hearn  in  Japan 

as  he  appeared) ;  but  from  his  seeming  im 
possibility,  I  cannot  help  observing  that  his 
real  self  which  is  not  without  charm  and  beauty 
hovered  and  flapped  as  a  grey  mist  of  silence. 
To  be  his  biographer,  you  should  be  a  man  of 
shadow  and  echo  like  Hearn  as  Dr.  Gould  said, 
whose  voidness  of  mind  will  prove  to  be  the 
power  of  mirroring  with  his  real  personality. 
You  must  understand  with  a  sheer  impulse  but 
not  with  a  brain  such  a  personality  as  Hearn's 
who  walked  the  mountains  from  summit  to 
summit ;  any  ordinary  measure  will  be  found  unfit. 
To  make  allowances  for  him  is  only  a  way  of 
blessing. 

I  have  many  a  reason  of  joy  for  living  in  Japan. 
Here  personality  is  not  talked  of  so  much,  and 
gossip  is  only  a  little  short  of  crime,  and  silence 
is  poetry  and  virtue.  (We  never  talk  of  Hearn's 
personality  here  ;  it  is  enough  to  have  his  books.) 
It  is  said  in  Japan  that  any  bad  man  has  a  right  to 
become  a  hotoke  or  Buddha,  and  that  death  is  eman 
cipation  ;  I  am  sure  that  even  Hearn  as  a  Japanese 
must  have  become  a  hotoke  now  sleeping  in  his 
beloved  Zoshigaya  ;  and  we  have  only  to  burn 
incense  before  his  grave  and  read  a  sutra,  if  we 
cannot  say  anything  good  about  him  in  public. 


Defence  of  Hearn  23 

Indeed,  to  keep  silence  is  better  than  praise.  But 
it  is  perfectly  appalling  to  observe  in  the  Western 
countries  .that  when  one  dies  his  friends  have  to 
rush  to  print  his  private  letters  and  even  an 
unexpected  person  volunteers  to  speak  as  "  his 
best  friend,"  and  presumes  to  write  his  biography. 
I  agree  with  Dr.  Gould  that  the  publication  of 
Hearn 's  letters  by  Elisabeth  Bisland  (the  Life  and 
Letters  of  Lafcadio  Hearn)  was  a  sad  affair ;  I 
believe  that,  not  only  Hearn's  letters,  but  any 
body's  private  letters  except  when  they  speak  to 
the  public  through  their  channels  should  not  be 
printed.  They  are  only  charming  when  they  are 
kept  privately ;  but  they  become  quite  often  a 
nuisance  when  they  are  brought  out  to  the  public 
gaze.  Their  sacredness  should  be  protected  ;  and 
how  often  that  shrine  of  sacredness  has  been 
stamped  to  the  ground  in  the  West !  Such  a 
practice  would  make  any  one,  not  only  one  of  a 
sensitive  cast  of  mind,  hold  back  his  spontaneity 
in  his  correspondence,  and  appear  always  in  his 
best  air  of  formalism  which  means  death  to  the 
private  exchange  of  thought  and  fancy.  The 
informal  exposure  of  one's  weakness  is  a  delight 
ful  part  of  a  private  letter  ;  and  exaggeration  is  a 
beauty  of  it.  I  think  that  Hearn's  letters  are  a 


24        Lafcadio  Hearn  in  Japan 

sort  of  confession  of  his  worse  self  (according  to 
Dr.  Gould)  by  virtue  of  which  confession  he  was 
unconsciously  finding  a  way  of  spiritual  exaltation ; 
they  are  like  the  shell  of  a  cicada  the  shedding  of 
which  is  a  course  of  evolution  ;  they  were  for 
Hearn  a  life  and  a  prayer.  It  is  said  in  Japan 
that  true  confession,  however  bad  it  be,  is  divine ; 
the  best  respect  to  pay  it  is  to  forget.  I  am  sure 
that  nobody  has  a  right  to  publish  it  as  if  it  were 
his  own  property.  And  what  shall  I  say  of  the 
real  nature  of  Dr.  Gould's  "friendship"  with 
Hearn  in  publishing  his  book  which  is  nothing  but 
an  emphasis  over  Miss  Bisland's  already  sad 
undertaking  ?  He  doubted  Hearn's  consciousness 
of  mind  and  his  magnanimity  ;  and  I  should  like 
to  doubt  the  same  things  of  Dr.  Gould.  As  he 
said  somewhere,  it  is  a  perfectly  thankless  task 

Mrs.  Hearn  said  to  me  she  used  to  keep  his  letters  in 
his  drawer  for  two  or  three  days  at  least,  when  Hearn  asked 
her  to  mail  them,  as  she  found  quite  frequently  he  wrote  a 
letter  of  very  warm  coloring  in  spite  of  himself,  since  his 
blood  boiled  unnecessarily  for  any  slight  matter,  and  that  he 
felt  awfully  sorry  afterward  for  writing  it.  "  Did  you  mail 
my  letter  ?  Not  yet  ?  I  am  so  glad,"  he  would  say  when 
she  gave  him  back  the  letter  which  he  had  asked  her  to 
mail,  and  he  was  then  found,  Mrs.  Hearn  said,  tearing  it  to 
pieces. 


Defence  of  Hearn  25 

to  write  such  a  book  ;  and  why  did  he  hazard 
himself  with  it  ?  And  what  will  the  world  gain 
from  his  book  ?  Hearn  was  right,  I  think,  to 
say  that  he  would  rather  trust  his  enemies  than 
his  friends.  It  is  an  old  Chinese  saying  that  it  is 
a  heavenly  lot  to  succeed  in  gaining  one  real 
friend  in  your  whole  life ;  and  the  saddest  thing 
with  Hearn  was  that  he  had  none.  It  is  true  that 
his  scepticism  of  human  nature  deprived  him  of 
such  fortune ;  however,  I  believe  with  him  that 
solitude  is  a  far  greater  blessing,  and  a  golden 
castle  where  the  merciful  goddess  of  Silence 
protects  you.  Any  criticism  which  has  no  breath 
of  respect  has  no  right  to  its  existence ;  that 
breath  is  the  fundamental  qualification  for  any 
biography.  To  see  Dr.  Gould's  failure  in  his 
book  is  only  to  behold  Hearn  soaring  out 
magnificently  in  silence  ;  it  is  rather  a  pity  for  Dr. 
Gould.  I  am  sure  that  Mrs.  Hearn  would  never 
accept  any  money  from  him ;  I  read  in  his  preface 
that  the  excess  of  money  accruing  from  the  book 
beyond  the  expense  of  publication  will  be  sent  to 
her.  The  book  is  no  slight  attack  upon  Mrs, 
Hearn  who  keeps  a  cherished  memory  of  her  dead 
husband ;  and  what  benefit  will  he  gain  from 
inviting  Hearn's  children  to  distrust  their  father  ? 


26         Lafcadio  Hearn  in  Japan 


I  see  not  only  a  few  places  where  Dr.  Gould  has 
over-stepped  the  fence  of  his  own  discretion. 

We  had  enough  sadness  ii\Poe-already,  who  was 
over-colored  and  even  blackened  only  to  make, 
perhaps  on  the  part  of  his  biographers,  a  terribly 
romantic  figure  out  of  him  ;  I  always  believe  that 
he  was  awfully  misunderstood.  And  I  do  not  see 
any  wisdom  at  all  in  making  another  Poe  out  of 
Hearn.  Here  in  Japan  we  do  not  make  an  art  of 
biography-writing  ;  and  I  wish  that  such  a  modern 
fashion  of  the  West  may  never  invade  our  Japanese 
literature.  And  I  think  that  English  literature 
would  be  ten  times  better  off  without  it  too.  It 
is  easy  to  say  in  writing  that  a  man  has  no 
morality,  and  that  he  was  an  apostle  of  morbidity ; 
but  you  know  well  that  nobody  could  be  so  in 
the  absolute.  What  Dr.  Gould  said  about  Hearn 
of  the  days  in  Cincinnati,  New  Orleans  and 
Martinique  may  be  true  ;  but  you  must  remember 
that  he  spent  his  best  years  as  a  writer  in  Japan 
where  the  calm,  grey  atmosphere  clearly  distilled 
his  character  ;  it  was  in  Japan  where  he  could  find 
his  home  and  the  perfect  ease  of  mind  which 
marvellously  blossomed  in  his  Japanese  books. 
You  must  judge  him  as  a  Hearn  in  Japan. 
Doubtless  it  was  no  small  joy  for  him  not  to  be 


Defence  of  Hearn  27 

observed  too  closely  for  his  unbecoming  physical 
appearance  in  Japan,  where  we  do  not  make  much 
of  it.  He  may  have  been  poverty-stricken  in  his 
American  days  ;  and  his  utter  unfamiliarity  with 
any  sympathetic  air,  I  believe,  made  him  act 
wantonly  in  spite  of  himself ;  and  we  know  there 
is  a  certain  period  of  youth,  also,  when  we  think 
it  rather  wonderful  to  say  and  act  something 
which  might  be  criticized  as  immoral  and  mate 
rialistic  ;  in  fact,  wickedness  appears  more  grand. 
But  it  is  only  the  sin  of  youth  which  will  pass 
away  when  one  finds  his  own  place  and  soul  ; 
and  they  came  to  Hearn  in  Japan  where  he  was 
respected  as  a  teacher,  and  even  materially  well 
off",  in  fact,  much  richer  than  his  fellow  teachers. 
I  do  not  understand  what  Dr.  Gould  means  by 
the  word  "  uneducated  "  ;  it  is  nothing  but  his 
superstition  to  think  that  education  can  only  be 
reached  through  a  college  door.  I  know  few 
writers  have  loved  books  and  anything  beautiful 
so  passionately  as  Hearn  ;  it  is  his  greatness  not 
to  display  his  scholaiiiness ;  in  truth,  he  soared  out 
of  it.  We  say  here  in  Japan  :  Mi  so  no  miso 
kusaki  wa  miso  ni  arazu.  (The  bean  sauce 
which  smells  bean  sauce  too  much  is  not  the  best 
kind  of  bean  sauce.)  And  .what  a  strong  smell 


s8         Lafcadio  Hearn  in  Japan 

of  psychology  Dr.  Gould's  book  sends  forth ! 
Hearn's  most  important  merit  is  that  he  remain 
ed  marvelously  in  the  state  of  simplicity  of  the 
ancient  age,  and  of  vision  which  is  charmingly 
far-away,  in  this  composite  age  where  the  op 
pression  of  reality  is  rather  unbearable.  To  be  not 
a  Christian  does  not  mean  necessarily  to  be 
religionless ;  most  Japanese  are  not  Christians. 
And  Hearn  placed  Art  above  any  religion  of  the 
world,  and  through  its  light  we  must  judge  him. 
Above  all,  I  find  such  a  difficulty  to  understand 
what  Dr.  Gould  means  by  Heam's  "  absolute 
lack  of  practical  sexual  virtue  "  ;  I  know,  how 
ever,  that  he  was,  at  least,  loyal  to  a  Japanese 
woman  whose  bosom  of  love  yielded  him  the 
secret  key  by  which  he  was  enabled  to  enter 
into  the  inner  beauty  and  life  of  Japan.  In  fact 
there's  no  other  writer  who  has  sung  so  nobly 
of  the  Japanese  woman.  And  I  have  no  word 
to  say  if  Dr.  Gould  says  that  he  would  never 
believe  what  Hearn  said  of  her,  and  thinks  it  is 
merely  a  piece  of  literature. 

I  admit  that  he  was  not  loyal  in  his  friendship 
except  toward  a  few  persons  ;  but  his  action  had 
his  own  justification.  And  it  is  to  pity  rather 
than  to  blame  that  he  thought  it  only  the  way  to 


Defence  of  Hearn  29 


protect  his  own  silence  and  self  from  disturbance  ; 
I  believe  he  must  have  been  thinking  that  the 
books  he  wrote  were  nothing  but  the  precious 
gifts  which  he  won  from  being  somewhat  disloyal 
to  his  friends,  and  from  his  solitude.  And  I 
should  say  that  we  must  be  thankful  for  it.  There 
has  been  question  of  his  conscious  intention  ;  but 
who  could  write  so  many  books  without  it  ?  He 
must  be  judged  as  a  writer,  not  under  any  other 
shade ;  and  it  is  your  kindness  and  respect  to  him 
to  make  him  appear  in  his  best  light. 

The  Japanese  writer  and  poet  whose  turn  of 
thought  is  philosophical  craves  to  attain  the  state 
of  voidness  of  mind,  not  the  passive  voidness,  but 
the  active  voidness  by  whose  power  you  can  grasp 
the  true  beauty  and  color  of  things  honestly  ;  it 
is  its  virtue  to  make  you  perfectly  assimilate  with 
them.  He  had  no  imagination  perhaps  to  build 
a  plot  and  situation  like  a  novelist ;  but  his 
imagination  was  the  highest  kind  which  transports 
you  at  once  into  the  transcendental  magic.  And 
I  am  told  that  he  had  no  imagination  whatever. 
How  can  one  who  has  no  deeper  touch  of  imagi 
nation  see  such  a  story  and  dream  like  Heani's  ? 
And  again  I  am  told  that  he  was  no  product  of 
his  environment ;  but  if  he  was  not,  I  wonder  how 


3o        Lafcadio  Hearn  in  Japan 

he  could  make  himself  at  home  in    Japan,    and 
become  a  Japanese  writer  as  he  was. 

After  all,  what  Dr.  Gould  pronounced  his  points 
of  weakness  from  his  dissection  table  are  the  very 
things  that  we  regard  and  cherish  as  his  sources 
of  power  and  romanticism.  And  perhaps  he  too 
may  be  one  of  his  enemies  who  is  doing  no  small 
service  to  him.  The  one  who  loses  by  "  Con 
cerning  Lafcadio  Hearn  "  is  not  Hearn,  but  Dr. 
Gould  himself. 


Ill 

MRS.  LAFCADIO  HEARN'S 
REMINISCENCES 

TO-DAY  or  rather  this  evening,  as  the  gate  lamp 
stamped  "  Koizumi  "  with  Japanese  characters 
was  already  lighted  when  I  entered,  I  found 
that  the  Hearn  house  had  been  slightly  changed. 
The  house  had  been  divided  into  two  parts,  the 
front  part  of  it  now  being  occupied  by  Captain 
Fujisaki,  one  of  Hearn's  Izumo  students,  and 
to-day  a  sort  of  more  than  friend  to  the  Koizumi 
family  which  needs,  of  course,  somebody  who 
will  stand  to  it  in  the  relation  of  a  guardian  god 
"  Niwo  "  to  a  Buddhist  temple. 

I  was  conducted  into  the  guest  room  by  a 
servant  girl  who  answered  my  "  Gomen  nasai  " 
(an  entering  word  used  as  you  would  touch  a 
button  in  a  foreign  house)  ;  and  a  few  minutes 
had  scarcely  passed  before  Mrs.  Koizumi  appeared. 
I  was  glad  to  see  that  she  was  better  composed 
than  at  the  time  of  my  first  meeting,  more  than 


32         Lafcadio  Hearn  in  Japan 

four  years  ago,  as,  doubtless,  she  has  conquered 
now  over  her  grief,  aud  that  her  beauty — a 
delightfully  beautiful  woman  she  is — was  ennobled 
by  a  mother's  dignity  which  gracefully  bears  the 
no  small  responsibility  of  her  four  children. 
(By  the  way,  the  youngest  one  is  a  girl  of  six 
years.)  It  is  not  a  daily  occurence  even  in  Japan 
to  see  such  a  woman  whose  sweetness  of  old 
samurai  heart  still  burns  beautifully  as  a  precious 
incense  rising  from  a  holy  shrine  ;  Mrs.  Koizumi's 
loveliness  in  heart  and  speech,  and  her  nobility 
in  appearance  and  manner  must  have  soothed 
Lafcadio  Hearn  first — we  know  that  hi-s  extremely 
delicate  mind  would  have  been  stirred  terribly 
even  by  a  small  break  of  harmony  ; — and  I  believe 
that  they  worked  a  magic  of  distillation  with  his 
character  and  temperament  which  finally  soared 
almost  divinely. 

He  wrote  in  one  of  his  letters  :  "  The  women 
are  certainly  the  sweetest  beings  I  have  ever  seen, 
as  a  general  rule  :  all  the  good  things  of  the  race 
have  been  put  into  them.  They  are  just  loving, 
joyous,  simple-hearted  children  with  infinite  sur 
prises  of  pretty  ways."  There  is,  in  fact,  no  other 
writer  who  has  so  sung  the  beauty  of  Japanese 
women,  or  who  was  so  loyal  in  faith.  Mrs.  Hearn 


Mrs.  Hearn's  Reminiscences      33 

gave  him  a  strange  key  which  he  found  fitted  to 
open  the  door  of  the  inner  beauty  of  Japanese 
life  ;  it  was  no  other  key  but  the  key  of  love. 
He  wrote  somewhere  in  his  Horai :  "  For  the 
spell  wrought  by  the  dead  is  only  the  charm  of 
an  ideal,  the  glamour  of  an  ancient  hope ; — and 
something  of  that  hope  has  found  fulfillment  in 
many  hearts, — in  the  simple  beauty  of  unselfish 
lives, — in  the  sweetness  of  woman.  ..."  And 
that  is  but  his  appreciation  and  devotion  for  his 
wife.  I  felt  a  reverence  sitting  before  Mrs.  Hearn 
at  the  thought  that  her  "quiet  gray-and-blue 
way  "  emancipated  him  to  be  as  we  saw  him  in 
his  later  years  of  Japanese  life  ;  and  I  thought 
that  at  least  half  the  admiration  given  to  Hearn 
should  be  given  to  his  noble  wife.  Indeed,  he 
ended  his  life  as  a  lover  of  woman. 

I  was  much  pleased  to  see  that  the  house, 
especially  Hearn's  study,  was  kept  as  in  his  living 
days.  It  is  Mrs.  Koizumi's  devotion  to  serve  his 
spirit  as  in  the  old  days ;  in  truth,  we  consider 
that  a  woman's  faithfulness  after  her  husband's 
death  is  much  more  important.  Here  in  the  study 
I  observe  a  strangely  high  table  in  one  corner, 
on  which  Hearn  used  to  write  ;  I  am  sure  that 
corner  must  have  been  his  favorite  place.  The 


34        Lafcadio  Hearn  in  Japan 

room  is  almost  surrounded  with  not  very  high 
book-cases ;  there  are  some  six  or  seven  hundred 
volumes,  and  among  them  I  found  the  complete 
works  of  De  Quincey.  Somebody  remarked  that 
Hearn  resembled  De  Quincey  in  many  ways. 
We  Japanese  know  that  he  was  a  writer  who 
passionately  loved  books  and  art ;  I  am  told  by 
Professor  Otani,  one  of  Hearn's  beloved  students 
and  for  some  time  his  secretary,  that  he  did  not 
mind  buying  books  with  all  the  money  he  received 
from  his  literary  work.  If  you  read  his  lectures 
in  the  class-room,  another  phase  of  his  character 
will  be  discovered  that  has  not  yet  been  brought 
to  public  notice, — the  logical  side  which  is  healthy 
and  studied.  He  grasped  two  extremities,  one 
of  which  kissed  the  star  of  idealism,  while  the 
other  stamped  the  solid  ground  of  science. 

The  light  was  burning  in  the  household  shrine 
which  was  also  placed  in  Hearn's  beloved  study ; 
in  it,  I  observed  his  picture  honored  at  the  center, 
and  before  the  picture,  a  large  piece  of  bread 
was  offered  on  a  little  sambo  table.  It  is  most 
beautiful  to  keep  his  memory  fresh,  and  serve 
him  like  that ;  I  felt  that  this  house  was  Mr. 
Hearn's,  perhaps,  more  than  in  his  living  days. 
Captain  Fujisaki  told  me  that  none  of  the  children 


Drawning  by  Genjiro  Kataoka 

WHERE  HEARN  IS  ENSHRINED  ;    THE    HOUSE 
HOLD    SHRINE. 


36        Lafcadio  Hearn  in  Japan 

would  go  to  bed  without  saying  to  his  bas-relief 
in  the  study  :  "  Papa  San,  good  night, — happy 
dreams  !"  He  is  regarded  as  if  he  were  living; 
the  incense  which  he  loved  to  smell  burns  day 
and  night;  the  people  of  the  house  wear  the 
kimono  with  the  designs  which  he  was  glad  to 
see.  Here  in  the  tokonoma  of  the  guest  room  I 
observed  one  of  Heam's  beloved  kakemono  pictures, 
which  is  a  priest  dreaming  over  a  scroll  spread 
on  a  table,  behind  the  priest  the  flaming  god 
"  Fudo  "  revealing  his  presence  from  amid  the 
fire.  I  believe  that  Hearn,  too,  was  dreaming 
throughout  his  life  of  a  god  of  fire  and  ideal  as 
this  sleeping  priest. — Y.  N.,  August  10,  1909. 


BESIDE  the  buying  of  books  (Hearn's  fastidi 
ous  taste  in  books  was  expensive)  his  other 
do-aku,  or  life-hobby,  was  to  collect  Japanese 
tobacco  pipes.  Like  any  other  Japanese  doraku, 
it  needs  not  much  money,  but  plenty  of  time  and 
patience.  I  believe  that  he  began  to  collect  them 
soon  after  his  arrival  in  Japan  ;  now  those  he  has 
left  behind  are  counted  more  than  two  hundred 
pipes.  He  never  bought  any  pipe  of  silver  or 


Mrs.  Hearn's  Reminiscences     37 

gold,  but  chose  a  common  brass  pipe  of  a  unique 
shape  or  with  carved  characters  or  picture  whose 
sentiment  appealed  to  him  at  once.  All  of  his 
pipes  in  the  collection  are  of  the  kind  we  call 
"  long  pipes,"  a  bamboo  stem  longer  than  twelve 
inches  connecting  the  bowl  part,  or  "  wild  goose's 
neck,"  as  we  call  it,  with  the  mouth-piece. 
However,  he  used  to  carry  to  his  school  a  little 
metal  pipe,  four  or  five  inches  long,  commonly 
called  "  Natamame."  I  see  in  his  collection  pipes 
with  the  picture  of  "  a  demon  muttering  Bud 
dha's  holy  name,"  of  "  a  badger  beating  his  belly 
like  a  drum,"  of  "  a  crow  perched  on  a  wither 
ed  twig,"  of  "  a  country  scene,"  and  others.  And 
he  loved  best  the  one  with  a  picture  of  a  woman 
tappinn-  with  a  mallet  (for  fulling  cloth)  on  its 
mouth-piece  and  a  cuckoo  on  the  bowl  part ;  and 
he  did  not  dislike  the  pipe  of  "  a  monkey-show 
man,"  although  he  hated  monkeys.  He  asked  a 
carpenter  to  make  a  sort  of  box  for  his  beloved 
pipes,  which  he  carried  everywhere  about  the 
house  with  an  amazing  attachment ;  it  was  not 
a  box  in  the  proper  sense,  but  rather  two  lidless 
boxes,  one  foot  by  one  foot  five  inches,  which 
were  joined  up  and  down  at  the  four  corners  by 
some  five-inch-long  pieces  of  wood.  All  the  clean 


38        Lafcadio  Hearn  in  Japan 

pipes  he  put  in  the  upper  box ;  and  when  any 
one  of  them  got  dirty  and  needed  cleaning,  he 
immediately  moved  it  into  the  lower  box.  And 
also,  he  kept  a  tobacco  pot  of  china-ware  in  the 
lower  part.  It  was  the  task  of  one  of  the  servant 
girls  to  clean  the  soiled  pipes  every  night,  to  be 
ready  for  his  use  the  next  day. 


HEARN'S  COLLECTION  OF  PIPES. 

I  always  wondered,  when  I  saw  him  smoking, 
what  heavenly  delight  he  felt  with  his  pipe.  He 
looked  so  happy  already  even  to  touch  the  pipe  ; 
he  would  pull  out  one  pipe  from  the  hundred 
pipes,  and  look  on  its  gankubi  (wild  goose  neck) 
and  mouth-piece  with  the  quick  glance  of  a 
connoisseur,  and  begin  to  smoke  with  a  shadow- 


Mrs.  Hearn's  Reminiscences      39 

like  smile.  And  he  would  try  another  pipe,  and 
again  another  pipe.  He  used  to  sit  as  a  Japanese ; 
and  when  he  smoked,  he  put  his  left  hand 
mannerly  upon  his  knee,  and  swayed  his  body 
back  and  forth.  And  I  heard  him  occasionally 
murmuring  "  No  "  while  he  was  smoking.  He 
was,  doubtless,  always  in  the  depth  of  medita 
tion  ;  smoking  opened  a  magic  door  of  dreams 
of  his  innermost  heart. 

He  rose  early  on  the  morning  of  his  last 
day  (the  26th  of  September,  1904)  as  usual ; 
he  used  to  leave  his  bed  always  before  six. 
He  was  smoking  in  his  library  when  I  went 
in  there  to  say  my  morning  greeting,  "  Ohayo 
gozaimasu  ";  he  appeared  to  be  fallen  in  deep 
thought,  and  then  he  said :  "  It's  verily 
strange."  I  asked  him  what  was  so  strange ; 
and  he  said :  "  I  dreamed  an  extraordinary 
dream  last  night."  "What  dream  was  it?" 
I  asked  again.  He  said :  "I  made  a  long, 
long  journey  last  night.  But  it  is  true  that  I 
am  smoking  now  in  the  library  of  our  house 
at  this  Nishi  Okubo.  I  cannot  help  thinking 
and  wondering  about  the  strangeness  of  the 
dream.  Indeed,  life  and  the  world  are  strange. 
Is  it  a  fact  that  I  made  a  journey  last 


40        Lafcadio  Hearn  in  Japan 

night?  Or  is  it  dream  that  I  am  smoking 
here  ?  " 

"  Were  you  alone  in  that  journey  ?"   I  asked. 

"  You  were  also  with  me/'  he  said. 

"Was  it  in  the  Western  country?"  I  asked 
again. 

"  Oh,  no,  it  was  neither  the  Western  country 
nor  Japan,  but  the  strangest  land,"  he  said. 

It  was  the  nightly  custom  of  my  children  to 
go  to  his  library  to  bid  him  goodnight,  before 
they  went  to  their  beds.  "  Have  a  good  dream," 
he  would  say  to  them,  and  the  children  also 
said  to  him  :  "  You,  too,  have  a  good  dream, 
Papa  San  !"  This  morning  of  the  saddest  day, 
as  it  proved  to  be  afterward,  my  eldest  boy, 
Kazuo,  went  into  his  library  to  say  good  morning 
after  making  ready  to  start  to  school.  As 
poor  "  Papa  San "  was  still  wondering  about 
the  dream  he  had  last  night,  and  knew  not 
exactly  whether  it  was  morning  or  evening  at 
that  moment,  he  answered  Kazuo  :  "  Have  a 
good  dream,  sweet  boy !"  Kazuo  also,  in  spite 
of  himself,  spoke  back  :  "  You,  too,  Papa  San  !" 
Both  of  them  laughed  a  moment  later  when 
they  found  themselves. 

He  used    to    walk    slowly    in    his    library  or 


Mrs.  Hearn's  Reminiscences      41 

along  the  corridor  facing  the  garden  when  he 
got  tired  somehow  from  writing  or  wished  to 
collect  his  dreams.^  He  walked  that  morning, 
too,  and  in  the  course  of  his  walk,  he  stopped 
his  step,  and  peeped  into  my  room  next  to  his 
library,  and  saw  the  tokonoma  where  I  had  put 
a  new  Japanese  painting  of  "a  moon  night," 
extremely  suggestive  and  lyrical  in  tone,  paint 
ed  by  an  artist  of  the  Bijutsu  In  school.  He 
exclaimed :  "  Oh,  what  a  lovely  picture  !  I 
wish  I  could  go  to  such  a  place  as  that  in  the 
picture."  And  sad  to  think,  in  fact,  he  had 
gone  into  the  country  of  dream  and  "  moon 
night  "  before  the  next  twelve  hours  had  scarce 
ly  passed. 

Two  or  three  days  before  his  death,  one  of 
the  servant  girls,  called  Saki,  found  one  cherry- 
blossom  which  made  a  kaerizaki,  or  "  a  bloom 
returned  out  of  season,"  strangely  pointing  to 
ward  Hearn's  library  from  the  garden,  and  told 
about  it  to  her  fellow-servant,  Hana,  who,  in 
turn,  reported  it  to  me.  I  made  it  a  custom 
for  many  years  to  tell  Hearn  every  happening, 
small  or  large,  of  his  beloved  garden ;  the 
banana  had  a  new  leaf,  a  yellow  butterfly  flew 
out  of  a  garden,  the  bamboo  by  his  library  had 


42         Lafcadio  Hearn  in  Japan 


a  new  shoot,  a  bullfrog  crawled  out  from  under 
the  veranda  floor,  the  ants  began  to  dig  a  new 
hole.  .  .  .  Such  small  things  which  would 
appear  ridiculous  to  others  were  very  important 
and  serious  for  our  Koizumi  family,  at  least,  to 
Hearn's  mind.  I  never  saw  such  a  person  as 
Hearn  whose  heart  was  disturbed  terribly  even 
by  a  single  shiver  of  a  roadside  weed,  whose 
sympathy  made  him  cry  even  with  the  falling 
of  a  flower.  The  time  is  autumn,  and  here  we 
have  a  cherry-blossom  opening  suggestively  and 
pointing  toward  him  meaningly  ;  and  that  cherry- 
tree,  not  much  to  look  at,  was,  however,  one 
of  his  beloved  trees  in  the  garden ;  certainly  it 
was  a  matter  worthy  to  tell  him  immediately. 
However,  I  thought  that  the  kaerizaki  was  re 
garded  in  Japan  as  a  bad  omen ;  and  without 
attaching  any  particular  meaning  to  it,  I  felt 
my  heart  somewhat  disturbed.  But  I  could  not 
withhold  from  telling  about  it  to  him  as  the 
bloom  appeared  so  interesting.  "  Indeed,"  he 
said,  delightedly,  and  came  out  from  the  library 
and  gazed  at  it  for  some  moments,  and  said  : 
"It  is  so  strange  and  beautiful.  The  flower 
must  have  been  thinking  that  spring  had  come  al 
ready  as  the  wreather  is  so  warm  and  lovelv. 


Mrs.  Hearn's  Reminiscences      43 

But  it  will  soon  be  frightened  and  dead  under  the 
approaching  cold."  You  may  call  it  supersti 
tion,  if  you  will.  But  I  cannot  help  thinking 
that  it  made  its  presence  to  bid  farewell  to 
Hearn,  as  it  was  his  beloved  tree. 

Nobody  seemed  to  know  when  the  blossom 
withered  away.  We  were  all  upset  soon  after 
on  seeing  his  sudden  ending  which,  of  course, 
we  had  no  thought  to  expect.  It  was  the  night 
of  Hearn's  shonanuka  (the  first  seventh  day) 
when  we  gathered  in  the  library,  which  was 
turned  into  his  Butsuma  or  Buddha's  Room, 
and  repeated  the  holy  name  in  our  hearts,  and 
then  we  happened  to  talk  about  the  cherry- 
blossom  of  kaerizaki.  We  found  out  that  Kazuo 
alone  knew  about  it,  and  he  said  :  "  It  was 
open  all  the  next  day  after  Papa's  death ;  and 
it  was  dead  at  evening." 

He  loved  every  tree  and  flower  in  the  garden 
with  equal  passion  and  sympathy ;  but  things 
like  the  banana  or  the  ryuzetsu  ran  (Dragon- 
tongued  Orchid)  which  we  brought  home  from 
a  temple  at  Yaidzu,  which  suggested  a  tropic 
touch  of  color  and  beauty,  called  his  ready  at 
tention  and  enthusiasm.  He  planted  them  where 
he  could  see  them  from  his  library ;  and  he  never 


44        Lafcadio  Hearn  in  Japan 

failed  to  call  on  them  every  day.  He  felt  an  un 
speakably  sad  pain  in  his  heart  to  see  a  dying 
flower  or  tree.  He  almost  cried  when  he  saw 
that  the  pomegranate  tree  of  the  garden  was  in  a 
doubtful  condition  one  year  ;  and  how  glad  he 
was  to  see  it  having  new  leaves  the  following 
year  !  He  thought  it  his  own  work  and  even 
responsibility  to  bring  life  back  to  any  flower 
when  it  was  going  to  die ;  I  saw  him  for  many 
days  moving  the  little  pot  of  a  manryo  in  feeble 
state  into  his  library,  and  again  bringing  it  out 
under  the  Southern  sunlight,  and  giving  water  to 
it ;  and  he  often  said  to  me  that  he  felt,  on 
seeing  its  miserable  condition,  as  if  he  were  going 
to  die  himself. 

We  used  to  plant  the  morning-glories  in 
summer ;  and  he  looked  upon  them,  at  the 
beginning,  with  such  a  wonderful  anticipation 
and  delight ;  but  when  their  height  of  beauty 
was  over  with  the  passing  season,  and  their 
leaves  turned  yellow,  and  the  flowers  grew  small 
and  scarce,  I  noticed  his  wretchedness,  which 
he  could  not  hide.  It  was  one  morning  of  early 
winter  when  he  noticed  one  tiny  cup  of  the 
morning-glory  which  had  courage  to  bloom 
under  the  already  bitter  sting  of  air ;  he  was 


Mrs.  Hearn's  Reminiscences      45 

overwhelmed  with  delightful  surprise,  and  ex 
claimed  :  "Utsukushii  yuki,  anata,  nanbo  shojiki!" 
(What  lovely  courage,  what  a  serious  inten 
tion  !)  We  Japanese,  as  you  know,  never  use 
the  personification  to  speak  to  a  flower  ;  and  we 
rarely  speak  to  it.  I  am  sure  that  our  servants 
must  have  thought,  as  I  did  at  first  myself, 
Hearn  was  crazy  to  address  it  "  Anata,  anata  " 
(you,  you)  as  if  it  were  a  living  person.  And 
to  return  to  the  morning-glory  he  praised.  The 
next  morning,  the  old  man  of  seventy  years  old, 
who  lived  with  us,  picked  it,  thinking  it  was 
rather  a  nuisance,  as  the  plant  had  ceased  a 
long  time  ago  to  bloom  beautifully  ;  and  soon 
after  that,  Hearn  wanted  to  see  the  flower  of 
"  lovely  courage  and  serious  intention,"  only  to 
find,  to  his  great  disappointment,  that  it  had 
disappeared.  When  he  was  told  what  had  hap 
pened  to  it,  he  exclaimed  :  "  That  old  man  is 
good  and  innocent,  but  he  was  brutal  to  my 
flower."  He  was  sad  all  that  day.  I  remember 
that  he  *vas  extremely  angry  one  day,  even 
changing  color,  when  a  gardener,  whom  we 
engaged,  cut  off  two  or  three  medake  or  "  wo 
men  bamboos "  in  the  course  of  his  work  in 
the  garden.  He  used  to  walk  with  a  delightful 


46        Lafcadio  Hearn  in  Japan 

deliberation,  two  or  three  times  at  least  in  one 
day,  round  the  new  bamboo  shoots  when,  tcr 
his  great  surprise,  they  sprouted  out  suddenly  in 
one  night. 

He  forbade  the  children  to  tease  or  kill  any  in 
sect.  He  was  found  sitting  sometimes  the  whole 
afternoon  on  a  piece  of  newspaper  which  he  had 
spread  on  the  ground,  and  patiently  watching  the 
ants  at  their  work.  He  used  to  say  to  Kazuo  : 
"  The  bullfrog  is  a  lovely  thing.  My  servant, 
whom  I  engaged  in  the  West  Indies,  was  glad  to 
sleep  with  one.  What  an  innocent  look  it  had  ! 
you  must  not  tease  it  under  any  circumstances." 
His  love  for  a  small  frog  was  great.  I  have  not 
a  few  letters  he  wrote  me  from  Yaidzu,  that  sea 
side  place  where  he  was  mightily  pleased  to  go  in 
summer,  which  have  a  picture  of  a  frog ;  he  never 
wrote  me  a  letter  which  was  not  illustrated  by  his 
own  pictures.  He  was  happy  to  sing  Issa's 
famous  seventeen-syllable  hokku  on  the  frog  : 

"  Tewo  tstiite 
Uta  inoshi  agent 
Kawazu  kana." 

(Putting  his  hands  so  politely,  Oh,  look,  the  frog 
is  offeri i  g  his  own  songs.) 


/  N 


-*. 

13 


A  LETTER  WRITTEN  BY  HEARN   TO   HIS  WIFE 
Little  Sweet  Mamma  : 

Weather  is  good.     Nothing  to  write.     Kazuo  studies  well 
No  news  at  all  here.     From  papa,  Yaidzu.  August  fifth. 
Frog  says  :     "  Lovely  weather,  indeed." 
Snail  says  :     "Yes,  it  is." 
Duck  says  :     "  Kwa,  kwa." 


Mrs.  Ream's  Reminiscences     47 


And  he  even  imitated  the  manner  of  the  frog-, 
to  the  delight  of  his  children  who,  in  their  turn, 
began  to  imitate  it  and  laugh  with  mighty  glee. 
He  often  said  to  Kazuo :  "  See  the  nest  of 
wasps.  You  must  understand  what  patience  and 
time  are  needed  to  make  it  complete.  And  it 
would  be  a  very  wicked  thing  of  you,  if  you  try, 
without  any  necessity,  to  destroy  it.  Do  you  not 
think  they  are  industrious  ?  So  you  think.  Well, 
it  would  be  the  same  thing  as  if  you  were  to  tease 
or  kill  a  studying  person  to  tease  or  kill  the 
industrious  wasps."  He  did  not  allow  us  to  kill 
even  the  flies.  His  library,  on  account  of  the 
Western  sunshine,  was  unbearably  warm  to  Japa 
nese,  and  naturally  the  flies  were  found  swarming. 
"Hai  desu,  hai  desu"  (only  flies,  flies),  he  used  to 
call  out  to  us  just  to  drive  them  out ;  he  said  that 
he  would  not  much  mind  them  if  only  they  would 
not  come  round  to  his  pen  and  bother  his  work. 
He  never  complained  about  the  mosquitoes 
which  are  so  dense  here  in  summer  nights,  though 
none  the  less  he  suffered  from  them  as  we  did. 
And  it  seemed  to  me  that  he  did  not  know  of 
their  existence,  at  least  while  he  worked.  He 
was  such  an  intense  nature  ;  he  was  perfectly  ab 
sorbed  in  his  work  of  writing  ;  and  his  complete 


48         Lafcadio  Hearn  in  Japan 

absorption  of  mind  which  was,  in  truth,  the  one 
way  to  turn  out  a  wonderful  art  in  writing, 
gradually  and  surely,  I  believe,  made  him  in  his 
manner  of  everyday  life  also  appear  strange  and 
even  outlandish.  It  was  not  seldom  he  looked  a 
madman,  as  even  he  acknowledged.  I  confess  I 
was  afraid  he  might  have  gone  crazy  already  in 
our  Matsue  day,  when  I  asked  Mr.  Nishida,  who 
acted  for  us  as  a  nakodo,  or  middleman,  of  his 
opinion  upon  the  matter.  However,  I  found  soon 
afterward  that  it  was  only  the  time  of  enthusiasm 
in  thought  and  writing  ;  and  I  began  to  admire 
him  more  on  that  account.  He  used  to  read  and 
write  at  night ;  he  would  open  wide  the  glass 
doors  of  his  library  on  a  summer  night,  no  matter 
how  thickly  the  mosquitoes  might  set  their  siege 
around  him.  As  I  said  before,  he  did  not  even 
notice  them.  And  when  I  silently  entered  from 
his  back  into  the  library,  I  noticed  that  more  than 
one  dozen  mosquitoes  were  only  crawling  on  the 
tatami  (mats),  being  unable  to  fly  from  drinking 
too  much  blood,  and  even  spilling  it  when  they 
crawled.  Yet  he  had  no  thought  of  them,  but 
only  of  his  dream  of  art  and  writing. 

We  lived  here  simply ;  he  hated  outside  com 
pany,  and  I  tried  also  to  escape  from  social  inter- 


Mrs.  Hearn's  Reminiscences      49 


course  ;  we  had  a  guest  very  rarely.  To  attend 
to  the  university,  to  read,  to  think,  to  write,  to 
hear  a  story  from  me  when  I  had  any  to  tell,  to 
teach  Kazuo  English,  and  to  take  a  short  walk, 
was  his  daily  course  of  work.  He  never  went  in 
a  crowded  street  of  the  city  in  his  walk,  which 
was  about  two  hours  every  day,  but,  in  fact,  he 
explored  every  corner  of  the  neighboring  country 
of  the  Ushigome  and  Yotsuya  districts,  especially 
of  Zoshigaya,  Ochiai,  and  their  neighborhood. 
He  used  to  take  Kazuo  with  him  ;  and  I  also  was 
with  them  quite  often.  He  spoke  to  us  very 
seldom  in  his  walk  ;  and  we  kept  silence  only 
following  after  him  as  we  thought  that  his  rnind 
might  be  busy  in  thought  and  dream.  But  he 
would  stop  and  look  round  at  the  scenery,  even 
commenting  on  this  and  that,  on  this  stone  Jizo 
idol  and  on  that  stream,  when  he  was  in  a  talka 
tive  mood.  '"  And  as  far  as  I  know,  he  never  failed 
to  drop  into  any  Buddhist  temple  which  he  came 
by ;  in  truth,  there  was  no  temple  unknown  to 
him  in  Zoshigaya,  Ochiai,  and  their  neighbouring 
places.  He  used  to  carry  a  little  note-book  in  his 
pocket ;  and  I  saw  him  frequently  bring  it  out, 
and  write  something  down  when  he  caught  some 
beautiful  fancy  or  phrases.  He  often  told  me  that 


5o        Lafcadio  Hearn  in  Japan 

those  he  got  unexpectedly  were  always  the  best. 
I  believe  that  his  thought  never  left,  even  a 
minute,  his  writing ;  his  mind  was  an  ex 
traordinarily  busy  one.  He  could  not  rest  in 
mind  even  in  his  sick  bed  ;  and  fortunately,  he 
was  never  sick  to  my  knowledge  till  his  later 
years. 

Even  I  cannot  properly  measure  his  tremen 
dous  love  with  his  first  boy,  Kazuo.  His  anxiety 
and  anticipation  grew  higher  and  higher  when  the 
month  of  his  birth  approached ;  he  was  afraid  that 
he  might  be  near-sighted  as  his  Papa  San.  He 
was  so  restless ;  and,  nevertheless,  he  was  so 
happy  on  the  other  hand.  How  often  he  begged 
my  forgiveness  for  my  suffering.  "  How  sorry  I 
am  !  I  wTill  atone  with  my  writing,"  he  used  to 
say,  and  retired  to  his  room  to  write.  And  he 
repeated,  afterward,  to  me  his  feeling  when  he 
heard  Kazuo's  first  cry,  which  he  could  not  ex 
plain  of  course  with  his  poor  Japanese,  nor  even 
in  English.  "It  is  the  most  strange  sensation 
I  ever  felt  in  my  life,"  he  used  to  say.  And 
whenever  he  thought  of  it  in  his  later  years,  and 
was  somehow  reminiscent,  he  said  :  "  I  will 
never  see  such  a  sight  again.  That  sight  was  so 
angelic.  Ah,  that  sight  of  Kazuo  !  He  stretched 


Mrs.  Hearn's  Reminiscences      51 

his  hands,  and  laid  them  down.  And  his  eyes 
looking  downward !  His  shapely  head  covered 
with  long  hair,  and  a  whirl  of  hair  in  the  middle 
of  his  head !  He  was  so  innocent.  Ah,  that 
sight  of  Kazuo  !  He  was  an  angel." 

He  was  so  proud  of  him,  and  carried  him  out 
on  his  arm  whenever  any  guest,  a  student  or  a 
fellow-professor,  might  happen  to  call  on  us,  and 
started  at  once  to  praise  him  without  waiting  a 
word  of  his  guest.  I  thought  that  his  manner 
was  uncommon,  at  least  in  Japan,  and  I,  being 
young  then,  could  not  help  feeling  uncomfortable, 
and  I  used  to  blush  terribly.  He  was  a  natural 
lover  of  children  ;  before  Kazuo  was  born,  we 
used  to  keep  a  boy  of  our  friend  with  us  as  he 
wished  a  boy  to  be  around  him.  It  was  the  year 
after  Kazuo's  birth  that  he  went  to  Kobe  (then 
we  lived  in  Kumamoto),  and  he  perfectly  fright 
ened  me  with  a  hundred  toys  he  brought  home 
when  he  returned. 

He  did  not  like  to  send  Kazuo  to  school  even 
when  he  grew  old  enough  ;  I  suspect  one  of  his 
reasons,  among  others,  was  that  he  could  not  see 
him  enough  every  day.  He  begged  me  to  trust 
him  in  his  hand  to  educate  him  ;  and  he  used  to 
give  him  a  daily  lesson  in  English  every  morning 


52        Lafcadio  Hearn  in  Japan 

when,  as  he  said,  his  head  was  clear,  and  he 
could  put  more  force  in  his  teaching  I  daresay 
that  he  thought  it  was  more  important  than  to 
attend  his  university. 

He  was  growing  old,  as  he  often  said,  when 
our  last  girl,  Suzu  Ko,  was  born  ;  and  he  worried, 
thinking  that  he  could  not  see  her  future. 
"  Nanbo  watashi  mune  itai"  (how  my  heart  pains 
to  think  of  her),  he  often  said  to  me.  However, 
he  paid  rather  little  of  his  attention,  I  think,  to 
our  second  boy,  Iwawo,  saying  that  he  was  bright 
and  wild  enough  so  that  he  could  make  his  own 
way  in  the  world  quite  easily  even  if  he  were  left 
alone.  And  he  used  to  say  that  Iwawo  was  a 
miniature  of  his  own  boyhood,  at  least  in  spirit ; 
and  after  supper,  he  frequently  told  of  his  boy 
hood  days  : 

"  How  naughty  I  was  when  I  was  a  boy ! 
Iwawo's  naughtiness  often  reminds  me  of  my 
boyhood  days  ;  but  I  was  for  more  naughty  than 
Iwawo.  A  lady  caller,  one  day,  came  to  see  my 
grandmother.  That  lady  was  such  an  osejimono 
(flatterer)  and  I  did  not  like  her  very  well.  She 
tapped  my  head  gently,  and  said  :  '  Oh,  sweet 
boy.  nambo  kawaii  musuko  san  /  '  I  was  angry, 
and  slapped  her  face  with  my  hand,  and  ex- 


HEARN'S  METHOD  OF  ILLUSTRATING 

"  Hearn  Often  Drew  a  Picture  for  Kazuo  as  a  Way  of 
Explanation  of  the  Poems  Which  He  Gave  as  an  English 
Lesson.  The  Pictures  Above  Are  for  KingsJey's  'Three 
Fishers.'  " 


Mrs.  Hearn's  Reminiscences     53 

claimed :  '  Osejimono,  osejimono !  '  and  I  ran 
away  and  hid  myself. 

"  When  I  was  told  of  a  lady  who  would  come, 
I  often  pushed  in  many  needles  from  the  back  of 
a  chair.  And  I  also  devised  to  put  a  little  bottle 
of  ink  upon  the  door.  The  guest,  having  no 
knowledge  of  such  mischief  set  for  her,  opened 
the  door,  only  to  make  the  ink  bottle  fall  down  ; 
and  her  kimono  was  soiled  with  the  spilled  ink. 
She  sat  down  on  the  chair  ;  and  immediately  she 
found  a  needle  pricking  her  flesh.  She  could  not 
help  being  annoyed  ;  however,  to  see  it  was  so 
amusing  for  me.  Then  everybody  stopped  call 
ing  me  by  my  pet  name  ;  and  I  passed  as 
'Onikko?  People  would  say  when  they  saw  me : 
'  There  goes  the  Devil's  boy  !  ' 

"  My  grandmother  used  to  take  me  out  with 
her  to  call  on  her  friends.  They  were  not  pleased 
to  welcome  us  as  I  was  with  grandmother.  They 
used  to  watch  us  through  the  door  when  I  was 
coming. 

"  I  liked  cake  more  than  any  other  boy,  I 
think  ;  and  how  I  hated  meat !  My  grandmother 
said  that  I  should  have  the  cake  if  I  would  eat 
the  meat.  I  said  :  '  Of  course,  grandma,  I  will 
eat  it.'  But  it  was  the  biggest  lie  in  the  world. 


54        Lafcadio  Hearn  in  Japan 


I  hid  the  meat  on  the  innermost  shelf  when  she  was 
not  looking ;  and  I  was  glad  to  eat  only  the  cake. 
One  week  passed,  and  ten  days  passed,  when  the 
people  began  to  smell  something  bad  from  the 
shelf.  They  wondered  about  the  smell,  and 
searched  in  the  comer  of  the  shelf,  where  they 
found  many  a  piece  of  rotten  meat.  And  they 
said  :  '  It's  the  work  of  the  Devil's  boy.'  I  was 
an  Onikko,  surely. 

"  I  rushed  out  from  the  house  whenever  a 
pretty  girl  might  pass  by,  and  kissed  her.  I 
never  failed  to  do  it  when  I  saw  any  beautiful 
girl.  Then  all  the  mothers  of  the  girls  were  mad 
with  me  ;  and  my  poor  grandmother  made  it  her 
work  to  go  round  saying  *  Gomen  gomen  '  (beg 
your  pardon,  beg  your  pardon).  How  naughty  I 
was  ! 

"  I  thought  it  a  jolly  thing  to  cut  off  all  the 
cabbages  which  our  cook  prized  so  much,  just  to 
see  her  mad  face.  My  grandmother  hid  my  knife, 
one  day  ;  and  then,  I  made  a  new  knife  my 
self,  and  tried  to  cut  off  even  a  neighbor's  cab 
bages. 

"  I  did  a  hundred  other  bad  things  which  it 
would  be  hard  to  tell  you  about  in  Japanese. 
The  people  used  to  say,  I  was  told,  that  '  this 


Mrs.  Ream's  Reminiscences      55 

Devil's  boy*  would  only  be  fit  for  a   prison   when 
he  grew  older." 

Hearn  insisted  on  eating  Japanese  food  all  the 
time  during  a  little  more  than  one  year  of  his  first 
Japanese  life  when  he  lived  at  Matsue ;  I  believe 
that  it  was  not  necessarily  from  his  preference,  but 
because  he  thought  it  essential  to  get  perfectly 
assimilated  with  the  Japanese  life.  However,  he 
gave  it  up  by  a  doctor's  advice,  and  he  thought, 
after  all,  that  the  Western  food  suited  him  better. 
Except  in  his  country  travels  and  in  the  summer 
vacations,  which  he  spent  in  a  fisherman's  zashiki 
(guest  apartment)  of  Otokichi  at  Yaidzu,  he  had 
always  a  seiyo  ryori,  or  "  Western-sea  food,"  at 
home.  He  was  a  small  eater  himself,  but  he  was 
simply  glad  to  see  the  children  eating  plenty,  and 
sat  with  them  till  they  had  finished.  Even  to  me, 
he  looked  a  perfectly  different  man  at  the  family 
dinner  table  from  a  Hearn  at  some  other  time. 
He  was  the  happiest  man  I  ever  saw.  He  talked 
and  even  laughed  boisterously,  and  sang.  He 
had  two  kinds  of  laughter,  one  being  a  womanish 
sort  of  laughter,  soft,  but  deep,  which  seemed  to 
meit  a  listener's  mind  away,  and  the  other  laughter 
a  noisy  kind,  in  which  he  was  only  too  glad  to 
forget  life  and  everything.  When  he  had  the  latter 


56         Lafcadio  Hearn  in  Japan 

kind  of  laughter,  all  the  household  burst  at  once 
into  the  merriest  mood  ;  it  was  not  seldom  that 
even  the  girl  could  not  help  joining  from  the 
kitchen.  And  he  was  a  joker,  too,  of  a  strange 
originality.^-  I  always  thought  that  it  was  a  queer 
contrast  when  I  considered  his  tremendous  love 
of  every  sort  of  ghost  stones.  As  you  know,  his 
ghost  stones,  however,  had  always  a  no  small 
humorous  touch ;  he  hated  a  story  which  was 
only  told  for  the  horror's  sake. 

He  often  played  "  Onigokko  "  (Devil- catching 
Play)  with  the  children  in  the  garden  ;  and  he  was 
delighted  to  sing  with  them  the  children's  song, 
Urashima  Taro,  which  is  about  Taro  who  returned 
as  our  old  story  tells,  from  Ryugu,  the  palace 
under  the  seas,  after  spending  many  hundred  years 
there.  Though  he  was  poor  in  Japanese  language, 
he  remembered  every  word  of  the  song.  He  was 
so  pleased  to  see  a  picture  of  Taro,  imaginary,  of 
course,  one  day,  at  one  of  those  picture  exhibitions 
always  held  at  Uyeno  ;  and  at  once  he  wanted  to 
buy  it,  not  waiting  to  be  told  of  its  price.  He 
was  almost  childish  in  his  joy  when  he  bought  it, 
and  took  it  home. 

"  Hokku,"  the  seventeen-syllable  poem,  de 
lighted  him,  too,  as  it  is  such  a  short  poem  and 


Mrs.  Ream's  Reminiscences      57 

easy  to  remember.  And  he  never  failed  to  sing 
aloud  "  Yuyake  Koyake  "  with  the  children 
whenever  he  saw  the  fire  of  the  sunset  in  the  sky ; 
his  color-loving  passion,  I  believe,  did  make  him 
happy  at  once.  When  the  Russia-Japan  War 
began,  we  soon  heard  every  boy  and  girl  singing 
the  song  of  "  Hirose  Chusa  "  (Japan's  national 
hero  at  that  time,  who  was  killed  on  the  Port 
Arthur  blockade  expedition),  the  music  as  well  as 
the  spirit  of  which  gave  him  great  joy.  I  found 
him  almost  every  day  for  some  time  singing  with 
the  children  :  "  Commander  Hirose,  is  he  really 
dead  ?  "  A  week  or  so  ago  I  dropped  in  the 
Mitsukoshi  dry- goods  store  where,  accidentally,  I 
found  a  tabacco  pouch  with  a  design  of  the  Hirose 
blockade  expedition  ;  I  bought  it,  and  returned 
home.  And  it  was  an  accident,  too,  that  I  found 
the  first  draft  of  Hearn's  translation  of  the  Hirose 
song  at  home  ;  I  put  it  in  the  pouch  I  had  bought, 
and  placed  them  on  the  family  shrine  where 
Hearn's  spirit  is  consecrated. 

He  grew  more  childish  every  year.  When  he 
sang  such  a  children's  song,  he  looked  as  if  he 
never  knew  the  existence  of  the  worries  of  the 
world  and  the  anxieties  of  life  ;  and  when  he  felt 
happy,  he  used  to  shake  his  little  body  (little  for 


58        Lafcadio  Hearn  in  Japan 

a  foreigner)  up  and  down,  and  hop  around  the 
corridor  and  veranda  of  the  house  on  tiptoe.  And 
on  the  contrary,  once  he  felt  sad,  I  believe  that 
with  him,  he  thought  the  whole  world  was  going 
to  disappear.  I  could  never  tell  him  anything  as 
a  mere  story  ;  he  took  everything  too  seriously  ; 
indeed,  he  was  ridiculously  too  honest.  I  thought 
sometimes  that  it  was  really  sad.  Even  a  ghost 
story,  he  could  not  listen  to  it  as  only  a  story  ; 
but  to  him  it  sounded  to  be  true  and  real.  And 
he  thought  always  he  was  in  the  story  himself; 
and  he  was  its  actual  character  who  was  acting 
in  it.  When  he  began  to  exclain,  "Nanbo  omo- 
shiroi  /"  (how  interesting),  I  always  observed  that 
his  face  turned  deadly  pale,  and  his  one  eye  set 
almost  motionless. 

He  was  almost  unbearable  under  the  oppression 
of  loneliness  for  a  year  or  two  before  his  death. 
I  always  found  him  trying  hard  to  hide  his  some 
what  sulky  feeling  which  rose  at  once  even  in 
parting  from  me  not  more  than  half  a  day ;  he 
longed,  pined  and  even  cried,  quite  often,  after  me 
when  I  had  gone  out  for  some  time.  He  returned 
to  his  babyhood  after  his  fiftieth  year.  "  Is  it 
Mama  San  ?  How  glad  !  "  He  used  to  rush  out 
to  meet  me  at  the  genkan  (entrance  room),  on 


Mrs.  Hearn's  Reminiscences      59 

hearing  the  sound  of  my  geta.  And  he  would 
tell  me  how  he  worried  thinking  that  some  mishap 
might  have  come  to  me. 

Thursday  was  his  longest  day  at  the  university  ; 
and  I  made  it  my  "  day  out."  "  Mama  San,  to 
day  is  Thursday.  Will  you  go  to  the  theatre? 
Danjuro  (then  he  was  still  living)  at  the  Kabuki 
Za  is  said  to  be  great  You  must  see  him,"  he 
would  say  at  the  breakfast  table  ;  but  a  moment 
later,  he  continued,  with  the  saddest  tou£h  in  his 
face  :  "  If  you  go  to  the  play,  you  will  not  return 
home  before  ten  o'clock  at  the  earliest.  Home 
without  you  is  not  home  at  all.  Tsumaran  desu  ! 
(Not  worth  having  !)  But  1  cannot  help  it.  So  I 
wish  you  will  go  to  see  Danjuro,  and  bring  home 
plenty  of  stories  as  your  omiyage  (return  gift). 
Your  stories  are  the  best."  He  used  to  insist  on 
my  seeing  the  play  ;  but  he  went  to  the  theatre 
only  twice  in  his  whole  Japanese  life,  if  I  am 
not  mistaken.  He  could  not  stand  the  crowd  of 
a  Japanese  theatre,  and  the  hours,  too,  were  too 
long  for  him  altogether.  And  again  he  had  no 
heart  to  leave  the  play  unfinished.  \  Then  he 
thought  it  best  to  stay  at  home  and  when  I  re 
turned,  to  hear  the  story  of  the  play  which  I  had 
enjoyed.  On  my  part  the  telling  of  it  was  a  very 


60        Lafcadio  Hearn  in  Japan 


difficult  thing,  as  I  must  tell  him  to  give  such  a 
feeling  as  if  he  were  looking  at  it. 

And  he  saw  only  once  the  Japanese  wres 
tling  match  at  Matsue,  where,  a  long  time  ago, 
Tani  no  Oto,  as  the  champion,  visited  the 
city.  We  treated  him  with  plenty  of  sake  and 
money  ;  and  the  first  impression  he  received  from 
this  champion  wrestler  seemed  to  be  always  fresh 
in  his  mind.  What  he  once  thought  wonderful 
and  beautiful  he  could  never  forget ;  his  mind  was 
extraordinarily  sensitive  and  sharp.  He  frequent 
ly  happened  to  exclaim  suddenly,  when  he  saw 
a  large  man  :  "  There  goes  Tani  no  Oto  !"  Once 
we  passed  by  the  place  called  Yura  in  one  of  our 
journeys,  where  we  had  eaten  a  delicious  tsukc- 
mono  (large  daikon  radish  pickled  in  brine)  ;  and 
he  never  could  forget  its  taste  in  after-years. 
He  often  said  that  he  would  be  happy  if  he  could 
taste  "  Yura  "  again. 

There  is  a  big  horagai  or  "  bluffer's  horn  "  (a 
kind  of  conch)  in  the  drawer  of  a  bookcase  in  his 
library,  which  I  bought  at  Enoshima,  the  island 
of  the  Benten  goddess  and  shell-work,  and  brought 
back.  Hearn  found  to  his  mighty  delight  a  big 
billowy  sound  when  he  blew  in  it ;  and  he  begged 
me  to  allow  him  to  blow  it  when  he  needed  a  fire 


Mrs.  Hearn's  Reminiscences      61 

in  his  tabakobon  or  smoking  box.  "  Oh,  hear  the 
bluffer's  horn,"  the  servant  girl  would  first  laugh 
at  its  funny  sound,  and  hurry  with  a  fire.  He 
was  extremely  happy  when  he  blew  it,  expecting 
secretly,  I  am  sure,  some  laughter  in  a  listener's 
mind.  Our  house  had  been  the  house  of  silence, 
especially  when  he  was  engaged  in  writing  ;  but 


HEARN'S  HORAGAI. 


•what  an  amusing  contrast  when  the  horagai  began 
to  snore  !  I,  as  a  Japanese  woman,  was  afraid  our 
neighbors,  which  were  not  so  many,  however,  at 
that  time,  might  think  that  Hearn  had  gone  crazy 
as  was  already  suspected ;  and  I  tiied  to  keep  up 
the  fire  of  his  smoking-box  and  not  let  it  die 
easily.  But  from  the  mere  love  of  blowing  it  he 
could  not  help,  once  in  a  while,  without  any 


62        Lafcadio  Hearn  in  Japan 


thought ;  and  finding  fire  still  in  his  tabakobon 
when  a  girl  appeared  with  fire,  he  was  found 
making  a  profound  bow  even  to  the  girl,  meaning 
to  apologize  for  his  "  baka  "  or  foolishness.  And 
none  the  less,  he  was  happy,  too. 

He  loved  travel  passionately,  but  always  chose 
a  lonely  spot  where  no  foreigner  ever  stepped  in. 
Nikko,  whither  every  foreigner  turns  his  head,  he 
never  saw,  and  he  even  hated  the  thought  of 
seeing  it  And  he  loved  Oki,  the  island  of 
solitude  in  the  Japan  Sea,  instead,  where  he  visited 
during  the  summer  of  1892.  He  frequently  said 
that  he  wished  to  live  and  write  as  a  light-house 
keeper  of  that  sad  island.  He  spent  his  first 
summer  in  Japan  at  Kizuki,  in  1891,  with  his 
beloved  Mr.  Nishida,  and  later  in  that  summer,  at 
Hi  no  Misaki  and  Yatsuhashi  of  Hold.  Hearn 's 
faith  in  Mr.  Nishida  was  something  wonderful  ; 
even  after  his  death  his  thought  was  always  with 
him.  p  When  he  heard  of  his  illness  in  1897,  he 
exclaimed,  "  I  would  not  mind  losing  everything 
that  belongs  to  me,  if  it  could  make  him  well." 
His  chief  delight  in  Mr.  Takada,  Dean  of 
Waseda  University  was  that  he  looked  somewhat 
like  his  early  friend.  And  he  often  frightened  me, 
saying  that  he  had  seen  his  ghost  in  his  street ; 


Mrs.  Ream's  Reminiscences      63 

it  was  that  he  saw  somebody  who  reminded  him 
of  Mr.  Nlshida.  He  believed  in  him  with  such  a 
faith  only  possible  to  a  child. 

I  cannot  forget  the  journey  we  had  in  the 
mountain  of  the  Higo  province  once  when  he  was 
still  at  Kumamoto  ;  it  was  already  dark  when  we 
were  told  by  our  rikiska  men  that  we  had  some 
nine  miles  to  travel  before  we  should  have  a 
sight  of  any  house.  It  was  soon  after  a  terrible 
flood ;  and  the  season  was  the  height  of  autumn. 
The  hundred  different  noises  of  insects  under  the 
'grasses  and  bamboo,  only  increased  the  almost 
unbearable  desolation  of  night;  in  my  heart,  I 
bitterly  cried.  When  we  reached  the  town  which 
our  rikisha  men  spoke  of,  I  counted  only  seven  or 
eight  houses  there ;  one  of  which  was  supposed  to  be 
an  inn.  It  goes  without  saying  that  it  was  inex 
pressibly  filthy  ;  that  much  I  could  see  even  under 
the  darkness.  The  two  shabby  andon  lights  were 
burning ;  and  two  or  three  kumosuke  (coolies  who 
frequent  the  great  highway)  were  whispering 
something  which  my  little  heart  suspected  to 
be  anything  wicked  and  murderous.  We  were 
'silently  ushered  up-stairs  by  an  old  woman, 
whom  I  fancied  to  be  a  Devil  woman  of  whom  I 
had  read  in  some  old  story.  After  leaving  a  "  bean 


64        Lafcadio  Hearn  in  Japan 

lamp  "  with  us,  she  never  came  up  for  a  long  time  ; 
and  I  overheard  now  and  then  an  indistinguishable 
sound  of  those  coolies'  voices  which  crawled  up  to 
us.  As  I  said,  it  was  right  after  the  flood  ;  the 
mountain  stream  rushed  down  in  a  tremendous 
torrent.  And  a  thousand  fireflies  like  ghosts 
appeared  and  disappeared  in  the  depth  of  the 
darkness;  and  many  of  them  passed  through  the 
room  gesticulating,  as  I  imagined,  to  suggest  to 
us  something  bad.  And  what  a  density  of  night 
insects  !  They  flew  against  our  faces  like  hail 
stones  ;  and  even  many  bell-insects  sang  sadly 
underneath  our  mats.  When  there  was  a  noise 
of  footsteps  on  the  stairs,  I  felt  at  once  that  those 
wicked  coolies  were  coming  up  for  some  bloody 
work  ;  but  it  was  the  same  old  woman  carrying 
up  our  supper  tables. 

"  What    are    those    insects  ?"     I     asked    her. 

r<  They  are  only  '  summer-insects/  okusan" 
she  replied  undisturbed. 

Those  "only  summer-insects"  were  perfectly 
ghastly.  During  the  whole  night,  I  was  shivering; 
however,  Hearn  seemed  pleased  to  no  small  degree. 
I  thought  at  that  time  that  he  was  the  strangest 
man  ever  lived. 

It  was  the  summer  of  1897   that  we  went  to 


Mrs.  Hearn's  Reminiscences      65 

Maizaka  on  his  friend's  recommendation,  to  spend 
a  few  weeks  ;  but  he,  finding  the  place  not  to  his 
taste,  insisted  on  starting  back  home  at  once; 
however,  he  was  persuaded  to  stay  over  night, 
at  my  solicitation.  And  we  decided  to  stop  at 
every  station  eastward,  and  try^to  find  some 
summer  place  of  his  preference,  ^and  it  was  his 
good  fortune  to  find  the  Fisherman  Otokichi's 
guest  apartment  at  Yaidzu  to  please  his  fancy. 
Kazuo  and  I,  we  confess,  did  not  like  it  at  all, 
as,  in  the  first  place,  the  mats  were  dirty, 
having  many  fleas,  and  the  ceiling  was  low,  and  I 
am  sure  even  a  student  would  not  be  pleased  with 
such  a  place.  "  It's  not  necessary  to  look  at  the 
worst  side,  Mama  San,  but  only  to  look  and 
admire  such  a  great  sea  which  we  can  see  to  our 
heart's  content,"  he  used  to  say  when  he  saw  my 
dissatisfied  face.  He  was  a  great  swimmer  ;  and 
he  begged  me  to  come  with  him  and  see,  even  at 
night,  how  he  could  swim.  He  had  such  poor 
eyesight ;  but  I  was  amazed  on  seeing  such  a  feat 
as  even  a  man  with  splendid  eyesight  might  be 
unable  to  accomplish. 

Yaidzu,  or  Otokichi's  place,  became  his 
summer  place  ever  after ;  he  never  failed,  not 
one  year,  to  go  there  before  he  died.  Once  he 


66         Lafcadio  Hearn  in  Japan 

wrote  me  from  there,  when  I  had  not  joined  him 
yet,  that  he  had  accidentally  discovered  a  certain 
Jizo  idol,  which  had  pitifully  lost  its  arms  and 
head,  and  that  somebody  ought  to  replace  it  with 
a  new  idol,  and  that  he  was  thinking  of  offering 
himself  to  do  such  a  little  benevolent  act.  And 
I  wrote  him  that  his  charity,  which  sounded 
poetical  at  the  outset,  would  cause  a  hundred  un 
bearable  troubles  ;  for  instance,  he  would  have  to 
give  a  considerable  donation  to  the  temple  to 
which  the  idol  belonged,  and  very  likely  to  invite 
the  whole  village  at  the  unveiling  day ;  and  that 
the  idol,  however  armless  or  headless,  would  be 
perfectly  happy  as  it  was.  Then  he  wrote  me 
the  following  letter : 

"  Little  Mama : 

Gomen,  gomen  /  (Forgive  me  !)  I  thought  only 
to  give  a  little  joy  as  I  hoped.  The  Jizo  I  wrote 
you  about  is  not  the  thing  you  will  find  in  the 
graveyards  ;  but  it  is  the  Jizo  who  shall  guard  and 
pacify  the  seas.  It  is  not  a  sad  kind  ;  but  you  do 
not  like  my  idea. 

It  was  only  Papa's  foolish  thought.  However, 
Jizo  Sama  cried  terribly  when  it  heard  of  your 
answer  to  me.  I  said  to  it :  'I  cannot  help  it,, 


Mrs.  Ream's  Reminiscences      67 

as  Mama  San  doubted  your  real  nature,  and 
thinks  that  you  are  a  graveyard  keeper.  I  know 
that  you  are  the  savior  of  seas  and  sailors.'  The 

Jizo  is  crying  even  now. 

From  Papa. 
Gomen,  gomen  / 
The  Jizo  idol  is  shedding  stone  tears." 

The  letter,  as  usual,  was  illustrated  with  his  own 
picture  ;  this  time  the  picture  was  a  broken  idol 
shedding  beanlike  "  stone  tears."  As  I  found 
afterward,  the  Jizo  he  took  such  an  interest  in 
was  not  a  graveyard  keeper,  but  it  stood  on  the 
shore  as  the  calmer  of  the  wild  sea,  as  the  Yaidzu 
sea  is  always. 

The  Jizo  idol,  that  charming  divinity  with  a 
shadowy  smile  that  makes  the  slumber  of  a  Jap 
anese  child  beautiful,  was  especially  his  favorite,  as 
it  appealed  to  his  love  of  children  or  his  own 
childish  heart.  I  saw  him  often  at  the  billow- 
washed  sand  of  Yaidzu  mingling  and  even  sing 
ing  aloud  with  the  fishermen's  unkept  children. 
He  always  invited  them  to  his  apartment  at 
Otokichi's,  and  was  simply  glad  to  hear  their 
stories.  One  evening,  one  of  them  called  and 
told  a  story  to  us,  Kazuo  included  in  the  com- 


68        Lafcadio  Hearn  in  Japan 

pany ;  whether  the  boy's  story  was  less  interest 
ing,  or  our  Kazuo  grew  sleepy,  I  do  not  know, 
but  at  any  rate,  Kazuo  opened  his  own  book 
while  the  story  was  still  going  on,  and  began  to 
look  at  it.  it  seems  to  me  that  such  a  thing  for 
a  boy  should  not  necessarily  be  regarded  as  an 
impropriety  ;  and  the  boy,  on  the  other  hand,  was 
only  a  fisherman's  son.  Hearn  had  no  single 
thought  of  class  distinction  like  a  Japanese  who 
was  bred  under  it.  He  began  to  give  a  piece  of 
his  mind  to  Kazuo  after  the  boy  left  us,  and  said  : 
"Anata  burei  shimashita  !  "  (You  were  rude  !) 
And  he  insisted  on  his  going  to  the  boy's  house 
immediately,  and  apologizing  for  his  burei ;  and 
Kazuo,  a  moment  later,  did  good-naturedly  as 
he  was  told.  .^ 

He  had  no  patience  even  with  an  animal  when 
it  acted  improperly,  and  his  mind  of  love  might 
be  wounded.  There  was  no  one  who  loved  cats 
more  than  he  ;  in  fact,  we  kept  one  or  two  of  them 
with  us  all  the  time  since  our  Matsue  days.  It 
happened  when  we  were  living  temporarily  on 
Tomihisa  Cho  of  Ichigaya,  that  our  cat  bore 
many  kittens ;  and  it  was  awful,  doubtless,  that 
she  ate  up  one  of  them  one  evening.  However, 
it  is  not  unusual  for  a  cat.  Hearn,  on  being  told 


Mrs.  Ream's  Reminiscences      69 

about  it,  grew  angry,  changing  color  as  he  might 
on  such  an  occasion,  and  had  a  girl  bring  the  cat 
before  him.  And  he  gave  her  a  long  talk,  and 
said  :  "  You  are  bad ;  and  you  inherited  such  a 
wicked  thought  from  countless  generations  which 
went  before  you.  I  cannot  keep  you  here  with 
us."  He  was  seriously  honest  in  his  speech.  And 
he  sent  our  rikisha  man  away  with  the  cat,  telling 
him  to  make  no  delay  to  throw  her  out  somewhere. 
I  suspected  afterward  in  that  night,  however,  he 
was  crying,  thinking  of  the  cat  he  was  obliged  to 
cast  off  unexpectedly. 

He  was  very  happy  at  Yaidzu  where  he 
wandered  by  the  water  ;  and  in  the  street  narrow 
and  shabby  as  it  was,  wearing  zori  (sandals)  on 
his  naked  feet,  and  a  summer  garment  of  one 
thickness  called  ytikata  or  bath-robe.  How  he 
admired  the  naked  feet  of  Japanese  working 
people ;  and  when  he  must  wear  foreign  shoes,  he 
chose  those  which  soldiers  wore,  broad  at  their 
toes,  without  any  style.  He  used  to  say  that  a 
frock-coat  and  a  silk  hat  were  savage  things  of 
the  world  ;  and  he  always  wore  a  sack-coat  of 
mouse  color  or  light  tea  color.  And  he  rarely 
used  a  collar  and  cuffs,  preferring  a  soft  shirt  over 
which  he  placed  a  black  tie  only  for  an  excuse. 


70         Lafcadio  Hearn  in  Japan 

But  strangely  enough,  he  was  extremely  fastidi 
ous  about  his  hat  and  under  garments,  for  which 
he  paid  the  very  best  price ;  and  for  many 
years  he  used  to  order  them,  especially  his  hat, 
from  somewhere  in  America.  He  had  his  own 
idea,  I  believe,  even  in  the  matter  of  dress,  to 
which  he  paid  the  least  attention.  "  I  like  this 
color.  Don't  you,  Mama  San  ?  This  design  is 
superb,"  he  was  always  ready  to  offer  the  words 
of  his  own  choice,  and  even  to  force  on  me,  when 
ever  he  happened  to  accompany  me  to  a  dry 
goods  store  to  buy  clothes  at  the  changing  of  the 
seasons.  It  was  not  seldom  I  felt  rather  uncom 
fortable  seeing  picked  out  for  me  some  too  showy 
things  for  my  age,  for  instance  the  yukata,  with 
a  large  design  of  sea  waves  or  spider  nets. 
I  often  suspected  an  unmistakable  streak  of  pas 
sion  for  gay  things ;  however,  his  quiet  conscience 
held  him  back  from  submitting  to  it.  The  Japan 
ese  boys  here  wear  black  tabi,  or  socks  ;  but  he 
wished  his  boys  to  have  white  ones,  saying  that 
the  flashing  of  white  from  under  some  dark 
kimono  was  so  bewitching.  He  looked  upon  dress, 
simply  from  the  point  of  view  of  beauty  and 
harmony  of  color. 

He  protected  with  his  utmost  effort  the  perfec- 


Mrs.  Hearn's  Reminiscences      71 

tion  of  beauty  of  any  kind,  as  it  was  his  only  god  ; 
and  he  had  no  patience  even  with  his  own  child 
ren,  when  they  rebelled  or  seemed  to  rebel  against 
it.  When  Kazuo  was  yet  merely  a  child,  he 
spoild,  one  day,  the  paper  of  a  newly -rna.de/usuma 
(sliding  screen)  with  his  wet  fingers.  Hearn  said 
to  me,  with  the  saddest  face,  "  Kazuo  has  ruined 
such  a  beautiful  thing.  Nanbo  shinpai !  How 
sad  !  "  I  believe  that  he  thought  that  even  a  child 
should  be  as  reverent  toward  beauty  as  himself; 
he  could  never  compromise  under  any  circum 
stances.  I  even  believe  he  suspected  at  once  an 
impossibility  of  Kazuo  in  the  way  of  beauty  ;  and 
he  was,  indeed,  sad,  thinking  that  the  boy  could 
not  inherit  his  father's  emotional  worship  of 
beauty  and  art. 

As  I  said,  he  was  happy  at  Yaidzu  with  the 
fishermen  and  country  folk.  "  You  have  come 
again  this  year.  We  are  glad  to  have  you  here 
with  us,"  he  would  be  addressed,  even  by  a 
stranger,  when  he  stepped  out  of  the  train  at 
Yaidzu.  It  goes  without  saying  that  his  re 
sponsive  heart  would  jump  high  in  joy.  Tokyo 
for  him,  as  he  always  said,  was  the  saddest  hole 
of  the  world,  where  you  could  never  know  even 
the  names  of  your  neighbors.  He  was  greeted 


72        Lafcadio  Hearn  In  Japan 

by  the  Yaidzu  people  wherever  he  went ;  and  he 
was  highly  pleased  to  become  one  of  them,  even 
for  the  short  time  of  his  summer  vacation.  In 
truth,  he  prized  the  friendship  of  country  barbers 
and  priests  more  than  that  of  college  professors. 
He  found  to  his  delight  a  good  barber  at  Yaidzu, 
whom  he  always  paid  five  times  more  for  his  work; 
once  he  asked  him  to  sharpen  his  knife  and  it  was 
returned  to  him  in  first-class  order ;  and  he  sent 
a  man  immediately  to  remunerate  the  barber, 
giving  him  fifty  sen.  The  fellow  thought  even 
twenty  sen  would  be  too  much  for  such 
work,  for  which  less  than  ten  sen  is  usually  paid ; 
and  he  returned  to  Hearn  after  giving  the 
barber  twenty  sen,  which  was  accepted  with 
the  greatest  thanks.  Hearn,  not  pleased  with 
the  fellow's  ill-advised  action  and  growing 
angry,  started  at  once,  grasping  the  thirty  sen 
he  had  brought  back,  and  gave  it  to  his 
barber  friend.  The  barber  wrote  him,  after 
Hearn  returned  home  to  Tokyo,  thanking  him 
for  the  kindness  he  received  when  he  stopped 
at  Yaidzu ;  and  Hearn  read  his  letter  over  and 
over,  and  remarked  that  it  was  more  precious  than 
one  from  a  Japanese  premier's  pen.  He  always 
thought  that  real  ability  was  not  properly  prized, 


Mrs.  Hearn's  Reminiscences      73 

and  it  was  his  greatest  delight  to  discover  it  in 
any  calling. 

It  was  a  long  time  ago  that  he  found  a  stone 
Jizo  in  the  graveyard  of  the  Ryushoji  temple  at 
Matsue,  which  was  not  much  to  look  at,  as  the 
work  was  a  rough  sort,  but  it  appaaled  to  his  sense 
of  artistic  appreciation.  As  he  found  out  after 
ward,  it  was  the  work  of  Junosuke  Arakawa, 
a  sculptor  famous  over  Western  Japan,  and  he 
called  upon  him  to  pay  his  respects  ;  and  he  sent 
him  frequently  a  big  barrel  of  sake  and  some 
money,  and  commissioned  him  to  make  many 
things,  one  of  which,  the  statue  of  the  Emperor 
Tenchi  of  the  seventh  century,  is  adorning  even 
to-day  our  tokonoma  of  this  Nichi  Okubo  home. 

He  was  an  ikkokumono,  to  use  a  Japanese 
phrase.  ("//£"  means  single-minded,  "koku" 
severely,  and  "mono"  person.)  He  was  far  too 
honest,  almost  to  the  point  of  a  fault ;  and  he  had 
that  peculiar  audacity  which  belongs  only  to  a 
child,  such  as  a  man  of  the  world  hardly  woulddare 
to  risk.  Such  a  temperament  made  him  speak,  and 
act  disagreeably  to  others  when  he  never  meant 
it  ;  and  Hearn  was,  from  that,  the  more  miser 
able,  making  himself  the  greater  sufferer.  He  had 
no  strength  of  self-restraint  except  in  his  art  of 


74        Lafcadio  Hearn  in  Japan 

writing.  Once  a  friend  s -nt  him  a  picture  of 
his  newly-married  wife,  and  even  asked  him  what 
he  thought  about  her.  He  showed  me  the  picture, 
and  said  that  he  did  not  like  it  at  all.  However, 
I  told  him  it  was  not  proper  for  him  or  anybody  to 
go  too  far  in  the  matter  of  criticising  another's 
wife  ;  and  I  told  him  that  he  should  say  something 
good  about  her  picture.  "  That's  terribly  difficult 
when  I  do  not  like  her  face.  How  I  wish  I  could 
deceive  myself,"  he  said.  And  I  soon  found  out 
that,  after  all,  he  sent  a  letter  to  his  friend  saying 
that  he  did  not  think  his  wife  beautiful. 

We  left  the  Inn  of  Zaimoku  Cho  in  Matsue  in 
his  first  year  of  Japanese  life,  as  he  began,  with 
many  reasons  on  his  part,  to  dislike  the  inn-keep 
er  ;  and  moved  to  a  certain  person's  hanare  zashiki 
(separated  guest  apartment)  in  the  Sueji  quarter 
of  the  city.  It  happened  at  that  time  that  a  man 
named  Hi  rose,  a  clerk  of  some  rich  merchant's, 
who  used  to  stop  at  the  same  inn,  moved  also  into 
one  of  our  neighboring  houses.  And  he  called  on 
us  with  plenty  of  nara-zuke  (cucumbers  pickled  in 
brine)  to  offer  his  good  wishes  and  future  friend 
ship  ;  and  he  said  :  "  I  hope  you  sfill  remember 
me,  as  I  am  a  friend  of  the  Zalmoku  Cho  inn 
keeper." 


Mrs.  Ream's  Reminiscences      75 


"  You  a  friend  of  the  inn-keeper  ?"  Hearn  ex 
claimed,  certainly  irritated.  "  He  is  not  my 
friend,  and — you  are  not,  either.  He  is  a  bad 
man.  You  go  away  !  Sayonara  /"  It  was  not 
the  guest,  but  Hearn,  who  rushed  out  into  the 
street ;  I  cannot  forget  in  what  an  embarrassing 
situation  I  was  left.  I  was  young  in  those  days, 
having  little  worldly  tact  or  clever  speech  ;  I  do 
not  remember  how  I  came  out  of  the  difficulty. 
It  was  not  seldom  that  he  quite  abruptly  put  me 
in  the  most  uncomfortable  place. 

One  of  Hearn 's  students  once  got  off  the  train 
at  Yaidzu  to  see  him  on  his  way  home.  Hearn 
was  very  happy  to  see  him,  and  happier  still  at 
the  prospect  of  hearing  the  home  news  of  Nishi 
Okubo,  as  he  thought  no  doubt  the  student  had 
seen  me  before  leaving  Tokyo.  "  Did  you  not 
bring  me  any  message  of  rny  home  ?  Are  all  of 
rny  folks  at  home  well  ?  "  he  asked,  without  los 
ing  a  moment.  The  student  did  not  answer  him 
at  once,  as,  in  fact,  he  did  not  call  on  me  at  his 
departure.  I  was  still  in  Tokyo,  not  yet  having 
joined  Hearn  at  Yaidzu  ;  and  I  was  told  afterward 
by  one  young  boy  who  was  staying  there  with 
him  what  he  said.  "  You  are  not  my  guest. 
Good-bye,  good-bye,"  were  the  exact  words  he 


76        Lafcadio  Hearn  in  Japan 

used  to  the  poor  student,  for  whom  I  felt  sorry 
indeed. 

However,  I  have  a  most  beautiful  memory  of 
Hearn  in  his  understanding  and  attitude  toward 
women.  He  always  wished  that  the  Japanese 
would  pay  more  reverence  to  them ;  I  remember 
that  he  wrote  one  of  his  friends  a  severely  re 
primanding  letter  when  he  was  going  to  divorce 
his  wife.  And  he  was  so  worried  that  another  of 
his  friends  did  not  say  a  kind  word  or  show  even 
a  smile  to  his  wife.  "  Do  you  love  your  wife?" 
was  the  first  question  he  used  to  ask  the  rikisha 
man  before  he  went  further  to  engage  him  for  his 
service.  And  he  was  never  disappointed  even 
when  he  found  his  man  too  slow  in  pulling  his 
carriage,  thinking  and  feeling  happy  that  he  loved 
his  own  wife.  He  would  say  to  me,  when  I 
complained  of  the  man's  slowness  :  "  I  like  the 
man  who  loves  his  wife.  Don't  think  about  his 
slowness  !  However  slow  he  be,  I  think  still  it 
is  quicker  than  to  walk." 

Ever  after  he  first  saw  the^«  Odori (Ghost-Fes 
tival  Dance)  at  Shimoichi,  in  the  summer  of 
1890,  its  weird,  dashing  movement  and  nocturnal 
lyrical  beauty  haunted  his  memory  ;  wherever  he 
went  afterward,  his  first  question  was  to  ask  after 


Mrs.  Ream's  Reminiscences      77 

it,  usually  only  to  be  disappointed.  It  had  been 
stopped  by  order  of  the  government  in  every  city, 
and  more  or  less  even  in  the  remotest  corners  of 
the  country.  "Keisatsu  damedesu  !  (Japanese  po 
lice  is  foolish.)  It  only  works  ruin  to  the  old  and 
lovely  customs  of  Japan ;  it  is  the  saddest  result 
we  see  from  Japan's  learning  of  Christianity  ;"  he 
was  always  irritated  whenever  he  thought  of  it. 
But  it  seemed  to  me  that  he  was  trying,  at  least, 
to  believe  there  were  still,  in  some  unspoiled  spot 
of  old  Japan,  the  rustic  folks  dancing  under  the 
blessing  of  the  summer  moon.  And  he  never 
failed  to  ask  anybody  from  a  country  town  who 
dropped  into  our  house  to  see  our  servant  girls  or 
on  other  business,  his  eternal  question  about  the 
Bon  Odori.  It  was  some  years  ago  that  we  stop 
ped  over  night  at  Sakai  of  the  Izumi  Province 
where  we  saw  the  last  and  best  Ban  Odori.  "  Oh, 
my  old  dream  returned  at  last,"  Hearn  exclaimed. 
We  had  gone  to  bed  without  any  expectation  of 
it  that  night ;  at  midnight,  a  wind  suddenly 
brought  to  our  ears  the  sound  of  "  c  han,  chan" 
which  we  thought  at  once  to  be  hand-clapping. 
And  immediately  even  the  sound  of  "  Shu, 
shu  "  of  people's  foot-movement  followed.  We 
got  up,  exclaiming  :  "  Bon  Odori,  Bon  Odori!" 


78        Lafcadio  Hearn  in  Japan 


Then  we  opened  the  doors,  and  found  ourselves 
outside.  The  rain  had  stopped  some  time  ago, 
and  the  moon  shone  brightly.  We  felt  delicious- 
ly  fresh  after  a  short  hour's  sleep,  and  hearing 
the  old  familiar  sound  which  came  back  as  a 
dream  or  ghost,  we  followed  the  sound  to  the 
place  where  the  Bon  Odori  was  being  held  ;  it  was 
the  Chinzu  no  Yashiro  (village  shrine)  where  we 
found  many  a  man  and  woman,  not  boys  and 
girls,  singing  in  a  voice  clear  like  the  sky, 
and  dancing  in  magnificent  style.  What  a 
night  revel  in  that  "ckan,  chan,  chart!"  And  what 
audacity  in  the  "shu,  shu"  of  the  dancers'  feet ! 

"  Oh,  what  a  wonder  !  How  great !  It  is  the 
first  time  to  see  such  a  dashing  and  beautiful 
dance.  I  wish  I  could  dance  with  them.  And  I 
feel  myself  as  if  my  body  and  bones  grew  big 
suddenly  as  those  dancers'  !"  he  exclaimed,  in 
delirium  of  joy. 

As  I  said  before,  he  grew  extremely  sensitive 
just  before  his  death,  always  sad,  quick  to  cry. 
He  cried  when  I  told  him  first  the  story  of  the 
Milky  Way  ;  and  I  found  him  quite  often  crying 
when  he  was  writing  that  story.  "  Papa  San,  are 
you  crying  ?"  I  said  to  him  one  evening.  "  Just 
touch  your  eyes  !" 


Mrs.  Ream's  Reminiscences      79 

"  Oh,  yes,  you  know  the  story  is  so  sad  and 
interesting,"  he  replied. 

I  found  him  frequently  in  the  library  almost 
jumping  in  joy  ;  and  he  exclaimed  :  "  You  should 
be  glad,  Mama  San  !  I  have  a  wonderful  idea  for 
my  writing."  Of  course  I  felt  happy  no  less  than 
he  at  such  a  time. 

"  Did  you  finish  your  last  story  ?"  suppose  I 
asked  him.  He  often  answered  : 

"  That  story  has  to  wait  for  some  time  yet. 
Perhaps  one  month — perhaps  one  year — perhaps 
five  years  !  I  kept  one  story  in  my  drawer  for 
seven  long  years  before  it  was  finished." 

I  believe  that  many  stories  of  his  were  left  un 
finished  in  his  drawer,  or  at  least,  in  the  drawer 
of  his  mind,  when  he  passed  away. 


IV 


YAIDZU. 


LAFCADIO  HEARN  AT  YAIDZU 

"  HE,  HE,  HE,"  the 
„,      good  man  of  Hearn's 
"  Otokichi's       Daru- 
ma  "  in  A  Japanese   Miscellany, 
bowed  and  began  sadly, — he  who 
kept  a  fish-shop   at  Yaidzu,  and 
fed    Hearn    with    fishes    cooked 
in  a  wonderful  variety  of  ways. 

"  Indeed,  Koizumi  San  was  not  a  person  whom 
you  might  expect  at  a  fishing  village  like  this 
where  there  is  nothing  to  see  but  the  wild  sea.  But 
it  was  for  the  sea  he  came  here  and  spent  his 
summer  vacation,  where  he  could  take  a  long 
swim.  Five  times  a  day  in  the  water  !  How  he 
loved  swimming.  I  never  saw  a  person  like  him 
to  stay  in  the  water ;  he  used  to  stay,  not  seldom, 
more  than  two  hours,  and  never  less  than  one 
hour.  He  did  not  swim  all  the  time,  but  laid 

The  thumb-nail  sketches  accompanying  this  article 
were  drawft  by  Hearn  during  his  stay  at  Yaidzu,  the  most  of 
them  in  his  letters  to  Mrs.  Hearn. 


Hearn  at  Yaidzu  81 

himself  on  the  water,  and  most  comfortably 
floated.  That  was  the  feat  which  amazed  us. 
At  such  a  time,  his  head,  his  toes,  and  even  his 
belly — "  Hearn  San's  taiko  no  hard'  (Mr. 
Ream's  drum-belly),  as  he  often  said  amusingly 
— could  be  seen  from  the  shore.  His  way  of 
swimming  was  different  from  ours ;  he  swam 
with  his  head  up,  and  he  used  his  arms  and  also 
his  legs  like  oars.  We  Japanese  swim  with  our 
heads  down,  and  rake  the  water  with  the  sole 
force  of  our  arms,  and  soon  we  grow  tired.  But 
Sensei  Sama  (Lord  Master)  appeared  easy  as  if 
he  were  taking  a  rest.  One  thousand  five  hund 
red  fishermen  that  we  have  here,  all  of  them, 
looked  at  his  swimming  with  perfect  wonder,  and 

said  :      '  Sensei     was     born     from     the  _;vater.f 

9 
In  fact,  no  one  of  them  could  beat  him  in   the 

water.  The  soles  of  his  feet,  like  any  other 
foreigner's,  were  so  tender  that  he  could  not  walk 
down  the  slope  of  little  stones  to  the  water  bare 
footed  ;  I  used  to  go  with  him  to  help  htm  into 
the  water ;  and  once  he  was  in  it,  he  was  almost 
a  fistu^He  walked  slowly,  doubtless  with  much 
pain  in  the  soles  of  his  feet,  leaning  on  my 
shoulder.  I  made  for  him,  afterward,  a  pair  of 
cotton  sandals  with  which  he  could  walk  better 


82        Lafcaclio  Hearn  in  Japan 

on  the  stones,  and  without  taking  them  off,  he 
rushed  into  the  water.  He  smoked  incessantly, 
day  and  night,  and  he  could  not  leave  his  cigar 
behind  even  while  swimming.  I  used  to  stand  on 
the  shore  in  the  darkness  of  night,  wondering 
how  far  Sensei  Sama  had  gone,  when  his  cigar  in 
his  finers  began  to  flash  like  a  firefly  at  an  unex 
pected  distance.  I  would  leave  a  paper  lantern 
on  the  shore  to  mark  a  landing  spot ;  and  when 
he  returned  from  the  water,  he  was  the  happiest 
man  in  the  world." 

(I  read  in  his  At  Yaidzu  :  "  But  the  primitive 
fancy  may  be  roused  even  more  strongly  in 
darkness  than  by  daylight.  How  living  seem  the 
smoulderings  and  the  flashings  of  the  tide  on 
nights  of  phosphorescence  ! — How  reptilian  the 
subtle  shifting  of  the  tints  of  its  chilly  flame ! 
Dive  into  such  a  night-sea  ; — open  your  eyes  in 
the  black-blue  gloom,  and  watch  the  weird  gush 
of  lights  that  follow  your  every  motion  :  each 
luminous  point,  as  seen  through  the  flood,  like  the 
opening  and  closing  of  an  eye !  At  such  a 
moment,  one  feels,  indeed,  as  If  enveloped  within 
some  vital  substance  that  feels  and  sees  and  wills 
alike  in  every  part, — an  infinite,  soft,  cold  ghost.) 

"  It  might  be  said,"    the  good   man    Otokichi 


Hearn  at  Yaidzu  83 

continued,  "  to  be  a  zense  no  yakusoku  (destiny  of 
last  life  appointed)  that  such  a  great  Sensei  Sama 
took  a  fancy  to  my  house,  shabby  as  you  see. 
The  mats  of  the  rooms  are  not  clean ;  the  house 
is  beaten  and  washed  by  salt  water  and  wind. 
However,  when  he  came  back  here  with  the 
returning-  summer  he  said  each  time  :  '  Otokichi 
San,  I  feel  as  if  I  had  returned  home  !  '  Those 
words  were  a  world  of  happiness  to  me  He  was 
so  kind,  and  perfectly  free  of  money.  He  used  to 
pay  me  two  or  three  times  more  than  I  asked 
usually  ;  that  I  became  better  off  may  be  said  to 
be  his  gift  to  me.  Every  member  of  my  family 
thinks  of  him  highly,  regards  him  even  as  a 
Hoioke  Sama,  a  Lord  Buddha,  who  came  to  save 
Otokichi  Yamaguchi.  That  is  my  full  name. 
Yaidzu  is  not  the  only  fishing  port,  even  on  the 
Tokaido  coast ;  there  are  a  hundred  others,  in 
fact.  But  Sensei  Sama  used  to  say  that  Yaidzu 
was  the  best  in  the  world.  '  Kami  Sama  no 
mura  desu  '  (This  is  a  god's  town),  he  remarked. 
I  can  say  even  with  authority  that  any  unhappy 
man  or  woman  who  once  wanders  into  this  town 
will  never  leave  it  again.  Het  isson  ikke  desu. 
(The  whole  village  is  one  family.)  You  will  -be 
helped  by  your  neighbor  at  any  time,  and  you 


84        Lafcadio  Hearn  in  Japan 

must  treat  his  children  as  yours.  Cry  and  laugh 
with  everybody.  Be  industrious,  and  be  happy. 
Above  all,  you  must  not  tell  a  lie !  It  is  said  here 
from  the  olden  age  that  any  one  who  practices 
wickedness  will  soon  be  punished  by  the  Goddess 
of  Fuji,  and  drowned  in  the  sea. ,  The  fisherman 
here  prays  and  claps  his  hands  morning  and 
evening  toward  the  Honorable  Fuji  Yama  for  her 
great  protection,  and  pledges  himself,  in  case  of  a 
good  catch,  to  perform  the  rites  in  honor  of  the 
divinity.  We  are  the  Fuji  Mountain  worshippers." 
Hearn  said  somewhere :  "  And  the  life  of 
Yaidzu  is  certainly  the  life  of  many  centuries  ago. 
The  people,  too,  are  the  people  of  Old  Japan  : 
frank  and  kindly  as  children — good  children — 
honest  to  a  fault,  innocent  of  the  further  world, 
loyal  to  the  ancient  traditions  and  the  ancient 
gods."  And,  indeed,  it  is  perfectly  natural,  as  I 
found  it  myself,  to  become  at  once  a  worshipper 
of  Fuji  Mountain  as  a  Yaidzu  fisherman  living 
here.  The  charm  of  the  town  changes  marvel 
lously  under  the  different  shades  of  sky  and 
sun  ;  the  charm  of  fresher  color  is  particularly 
distinguished  at  early  morning  when  the  sun  just 
begins  to  ascend.  At  these  moments  the  lizard 
curving  along  a  little  bay,  the  dear  old  fishing 


Hearn  at  Yaidzu  85 

town  seems  more  active  in  breathing.  And  it  is 
the  proper  time  for  you  to  come  out  to  the  seaside, 
and  turn  your  head  to  the  left,  and  meet  Fuji 
Mountain,  the  wonderful  ghost  of  the  clouds  and 
sky. ^  Not  only  Japanese,  but  the  people  of  any 
nationality,  to  be  sure,  would  grow  silent  and 
simple  suddenly  in  heart,  and  begin  to  pray. 
Here  we  have  the  most  extraordinary  rampart 
of  boulders  for  protection  from  the  heavy 
seas ;  the  rampart  is  built  in  the  form  of  terrace 
steps.  If  you  stand  on  the  top  of  the  structure, 
you  have  the  whole  town  at  your  back, — with 
here  and  there  a  pine  grove,  beyond  the  flat  space 
of  grey  and  world-wearied  Japanese  roofs,  mark 
ing  the  place  of  some  sort  of  sacred  court  like 
Enju  In  or  Chinju  no  Mori  (the  village  shrine), 
where  Hearn  took  his  almost  daily  walk ;  and 
before  you,  the  grandest  view  of  the  sea.'-  For 
the  last  two  or  three  days  as  the  time  is  still  in 
Baiu,  or  the  rainy  season,  it  has  been  very  rough 
and  high.  (By  the  way,  I  came  here  to  spend  a 
few  days,  and  associate  myself  with  Hearn's  land 
mark.)  I  can  imagine  him  anxiously  watching 
over  the  rolling  seas,  massive  and  formidable, 
in  company  with  many  fishermen,  standing 
by  the  rampart  with  their  eyes  set  on  far- 


86         Lafcadio  Hearn  in  Japan 

away.  And  again  I  imagine  him  sitting  in 
a  great  wind  by  this  sea-wall  with  old  Jinsuko 
Amano,  and  hearing  his  wonderful  experience  of 
the  seas  ;  Hearn  silent  and  slightly  afraid  to  hear 
the  awful  story  of  sea-drifting,  and  the  latter 
smiling  even  in  triumph.  ("  Drifting "  in  A 
Japanese  Miscellany^  I  feel  disappointed  in 
coming  here  a  bit  early  for  Yaidzu's  Segaki 
service,  which  Hearn  described  minutely  in  "  Be 
side  the  Sea "  in  A  Japanese  Miscellany.  I 
should  like  to  squat  down,  even  as  Hearn  did,  by 
the  sea  whose  rolls  and  crashing  of  mighty  tide 
make  me  return  to  sublimity  of  heart,  forgetting 
the  wicked  world,  and  under  a  blazing  sun  whose 
fires  are  like  slag  raked  out  from  a  furnace, — that 
sun  I  love  passionately.  And  a  greater  disap 
pointment  I  have  that  even  the  day  of  the  Bon 
or  Festival  of  the  Dead  is  still  a  few  weeks  off 
yet.  As  I  cannot  swim  like  Hearn,  and  overtake 
the  lantern-fleet  as  he  did  when  he  found  them 
already  in  the  distance  on  his  appearance  on  the 
spot  of  ceremony  (Hearn's  "  At  Yaidzu  "  in  In 
Ghostly  Japan),  I  thought  that  I  would  not  take 
a  nap  after  supper  as  he  did,  but  wait  patiently  by 
the  sea  for  the  time  of  the  ghost-lanterns  to  depart 
toward  the  Jizo  Sama  of  the  Izu  Province.  I  can 


Hearn  at  Yaidzu  87 

hear  the  sound  of  hammering  here,  a  curious 
melancholy  chant  by  the  people  who  are  engaged 
in  building  a  boat ;  Hearn  used  to  hurry  toward 
the  spot  for  the  sight.  It  was  half  an  hour  ago 
that  a  little  boy  went  round  the  town  shaking  a 
bell  and  shouting  that  a  thousand  Katsuo  (bonito) 
were  in  port  and  ready  for  people  to  bid.  This 
experience  of  a  fishing  town  is  for  me  the  first 
and  nev/est  surprise. 

"  It  was  not  only  I,"  the  good  man  Otokichi 
took  up  his  talk  again,  "  who  took  Sensei  Sama's 
death  to  heart,  but  all  the  people  of  this  town 
were  sincerely  sorry.  He  was  the  friend  of  them 
that  worked  hard  and  were  simple,  as  in  fact  they 
are.  '  Sensei  Sama,  good  morning,  how  do  you 
feel  ?  '  they  addressed  him  every  morning  when 
ever  they  saw  him  in  the  street  or  on  the  shore. 
He  was,  indeed,  pleased  to  be  treated  here  as  one 
of  them  ;  and  he  even  took  part  in  their  pleasures. 
We  have  here  an  annual  festival  in  honor  of  the 
village  shrine  ;  on  that  day,  all  the  young  men  of 
the  seven  districts  of  the  town  pull  an  ornamental 
car  for  theatrical  performance,  dancing  and  music. 
Sensei  Sama  used  to  contribute  seven  or  ten  yen 
on  the  occasion  as  money  for  sake  ;  and  when  the 
car  (dashi  as  it  is  called)  passed  by  this  house,  he 


88        Lafcadio  Hearn  in  Japan 


used  to  come  out  to  see  the  performance,  and 
again  treat  the  young  men  with  additional  bottles 
of  sake.  He  was  so  good  and  kind  to  us.  The 
most  pitiful  of  us  over  Sensei  Sama's  death  is  a 
little  dumb  boy,  called  Ko,  who  used  to  accompany 
him  like  a  loyal-hearted  poodle,  wherever  he  went. 
And  he  always  gave  the  boy  some  money  ;  and 
above  all,  his  great  sympathy  delighted  his  little 
mind.  The  boy  used  to  wait  by  the  door  every 
morning  for  Sensei  Sama's  appearance.  But  as 
he  Is  no  more,  and  another  Sensei  Sama  may  not 
come  at  all,  the  boy  is  sad  and  solitary.  Sensei 
Sama's  sympathy  with  any  weak  thing  was 
something  wonderful. 

"  He  used  to  walk, 
when  the  sea  was 
high  here,  to  the  place 
called  Wada,  some 
two  miles,  where  the 
CAT:  "WHERE  SHALL  i  GO?"  waves  are  always 

calm.  '    One  day,   he 

saw  a  black  cat  wandering  by  the  shore,  that  had 
been  cast  away  by  a  bitter-hearted  man  who  could 
be  seen  hurriedly  walking  away.  He  thought  it 
was  perfectly  pitiable ;  and  he  picked  it  up,  and  put 
it  in  his  hat,  and  brought  it  home.  The  cat  was 


Hearn  at  Yaidzu  89 

named  Hinoko  (spark)  by  him,  because  its  burn 
ing  eyes  impressed  him  as  a  fire.  I  noticed  two 
or  three  times,  afterward,  he  did  not  mind  even 
when  Hinoko's  muddy  feet  soiled  his  hat  or  his 
kimono ;  it  grew,  soon  after  to  be  one  of  Kazuo 
San's  pets.C  He  forbade  Kazuo  San  to  kill  the 
crabs  which  for  amusement's  sake  he  used  to  bring; 
to  his  boy  when  he  returned  from  Wada  ;  and  he 
begged  him,  after  a  little  while,  to  get  them  back 
to  the  water  again.  I  believe  his  kind  heart  was 
that  of  Hotoko  Sama.  ^ 

"  He  took  once  a  tremendous  fancy  with  the 
Naminare  JIzo  (the  sea-pacifying  divinity),  who 
lost  his  arms  and  even  his  head.  He  wished  to 
replace  it  with  a  new  idol,  and  presently  called  an 
ishiya  (stone-cutter)  to  design  it.  The  stone-cutter 
brought  him  more  than  five  times  a  picture  of  Jizo 
Sama's  face  which  was  not  quite  satisfactory  ;  and 
afterward  he  noticed  the  face  of  a  neighbor's  boy 
called  Zensaku  which  appeared  to  him  to  be 
a  just  model.  He  Invited  the  boy  into  his  room, 
and  let  the  stone-cutter  sketch  his  face,  when 
he  received  a  letter  from  Oku  San  (Mrs.  Hearn) 
saying  that  such  a  project  was  not  desirable. 
He  gave  it  up  at  once  obediently.  '  Mama 
San's  word  is  law,'  he  said.  I  never  saw  a 


go        Lafcadio  Hearn  in  Japan 

man  like  Sensei  Sama  who  listened  gently  to  his 
wife." 

(To-day  I  passed  by  the  Naminare  Jizo  who 
had  a  new  head  added,  although  his  arms  were 
still  lacking.  I.  thought  it  must  be  the  kindness 
of  another  Hearn  who  had  an  equally  good 
heart,  but  was  not  an  artist  like  Hearn.  The 
new  head  is  really  shabby  art,  but  the  idol,  I 
thought,  should  be  pleased  with  any  sort  of 
head.) 

"  Sensei  Sama  used  to  devote  one  hour  every 
morning  to  teaching  Kazuo  San  English  ;  and  I 
often  thought  that  he  was  rather  too  severe  in  his 
teaching  to  a  boy  like  that.  '  Don't  you  see  it  ?  ' 
I  frequently  overheard  Sensei  Sama  exclaiming 
in  impatience.  But  at  other  times  he  was  kindness 
and  love  itself;  no  father  could  be  more  sweet 
than  he.  Beside  teaching,  his  morning  work  was 
only  to  write  to  Mrs.  Koizumi,  when  she  had  not 
yet  joined  him.  And  his  greatest  delight,  I 
suspected,  was  to  see  his  face  growing  brown  from 
the  sea  and  sun.  '  Otokichi  San,  is  my  face  not 
brown  yet,  like  your  fishermen's  ?  '  he  often  asked 
me.  And  he  used  to  squat  on  the  shore  when  he 
came  out  of  the  water  and  I  wiped  his  naked  back. 
His  skin  was  perfectly  beautiful,  becoming  crimson 


DRAWING  BY  HEARN  FOR  HIS  SON,  KAZUO 

"Papa  Drew  This  Picture  When  He  Told  Me  About  the 
Eagle.  He  said:  'Eagle  Is  the  Greatest  Bird,  and  He  Can 
Stand  on  the  Highest  Mountain  Peak,  Far  Above  the  Fields 
and  River  ;  and  He  Even  Tries  to  Strike  at  the  Sun  and  Sky. 
The  Eagle  Is  on  the  Russian  Flag,  Too.  Now,  Suppose  Russia 
Is  an  Eagle  ;  and  That  Eagle  Tries  to  Strike  the  Sun.  That  's 
Impossible.  Russia  Cannot  Win  Over  Japan.'  " — Kazuo. 


Hearn  at  Yaidzu  91 

or  peach-colored  under  the  blaze  of  summer  heat. 
How  white  is  a  foreigner's  skin  ! 

"  He  was  such  a  considerate  man  who  made 
me  frequently  rather  uncomfortable.  He  thanked 
me  for  any  little  service  I  did  for  him.  '  Arigato, 
arigatoj  he  always  repeated.  And  he  never  com 
plained  of  our  poor  table,  which  must  have 
been  astonishingly  poor  to  him.  He  tried  to  eat 
up  even  the  things  which  he  might  not  like 
at  all,  simply  from  fear  to  hurt  my  feelings ; 
when  Kazuo  San  left  something  on  the  table, 
he  insisted  on  his  finishing  up  to  please  Otokichi's 
heart,  as  he  said.  After  supper,  he  used  to  walk 
up  and  down  his  rooms  for  exercise.  He  was  a 
wonderful  man  about  that.  Even  on  the  hottest 
day  he  never  failed  to  take  his  walk  ;  and  I  never 
heard  htm  complain  of  the  heat.  In  one  word,  he 
was  the  only  perfect  man  whom  I  ever  came  across. 
But  he  is  no  more  now.  I  feel  almost  like  crying 
when  I  think  of  him.  I  am  extremely  lonesome 
for  him,  when,  as  now,  the  summer  is  approaching 
speedily.  My  heart  is  sad." 

Here  in  these  three  rooms  of  twelve,  ten,  and 
four  mats,  the  upper  part  of  this  fisherman 
Otokichi's  house,  Hearn  spent  many  happy  sum 
mers.  The  rooms  are  bare  as  any  other  fisher- 


Q2         Lafcadio  Hearn  in  Japan 


maix's  with  no  kakemono  or  picture-hanging  on 
the  tokonoma  to  mention  At  «ne  corner  I 
noticed  a  common  sort  of  table  which,  as  Otokichi 


HEARN'S  ROOMS  AT  OTOKICHI'S. 

said,  was  used  by  Hearn  and  Kazuo ;  and  I 
thought  it  looked  as  if  it  were  waiting  for  their 
return.  I  believe  it  was  the  table  on  which  he 
wrote  a  daily  letter  to  Mrs.  Hearn,  informing  her 
of  his  simple  life  and  pleasures  which,  with  Kazuo 
and  sometimes  Iwao,  he  enjoyed  to  his  heart's 
content.  He  entirely  forgot  while  here  his  books, 
writing,  and  of  course,  his  university  ;  with  his 
boys,  he  was  almost  a  boy  himself.  His  summer 
letters  in  Japanese  to  Mrs.  Hearn,  though  they 
are  childish,  partly  because  his  Japanese  vocab- 


Hearn  at  Yaidzu  93 

ulary   was   pitifully  limited,  show  his  naive  and 
simple   temperament. 

I  thank  Mrs.  Hearn  who  gave  me  the  right  to 
transcribe  some  of  these  letters  into  English,  and 
to  share  with  you  the  pleasure  of  reading  them. 

"  Little  Mama  :  To-day  we  have  not  much 
sunlight,  but  Kazuo  and  I  swam  as  usual.  Kazuo 
played  a  torpedo  in  the  water.  (Hearn  means  a 
play  of  his  boy  who  pulled  his  legs  from  under 
the  water  while  swimming.)  He  is  growing  clever 
in  swimming  to  my  delight  We  had  a  long 
walk  yesterday.  We  bought  a  little  ball  and  a 
bell  for  the  cat  whose  life  I  saved  and  brought 
home.  The  stone-cutter  showed  me  a  picture  of 
a  face  which  is  supposed  to  be  for  the  Jizo  idol. 
Shall  I  let  him  carve  the  name  of  Kazuo  Koizumi 
somewhere  on  the  idol  ?  I  can  see  how  glad  the 
Yaidzu  people  would  be  to  see  the  new  idol. 

"  We  have  too  many  fleas  here.  Please  bring 
some  flea  powder  when  you  come.  But  this  de 
lightful  little  cat  makes  us  forget  the  fleas.  She  is 
really  funny.  We  call  her  Hinoko.  Plenty  of 
kisses  to  Suzuko  and  Kiyoshi,  from  Papa.  July 
1 2th." 


94        Lafcadio  Hearn  in  Japan 

"  Little  Mama :  Your  sweet  letter  at  hand. 
I  am  glad  of  it.  So,  Ume  San  (Professor  Ume  of 
the  Imperial  University)  has  built  his  own  new 
house.  We  shall  go  together  to  see  him  at  his 
home.  Kazuo  swam  into  a  deeper  sea  first 
yesterday ;  he  swam  five  times  toward  a  boat  at 
quite  a  distance.  He  is  growing  more  strong  and 
clever  in  swimming  every  day.  He  is  terribly 
black  now  The  weather  is  lovely  and  cool.  We 
gave  a  name  to  Kazuo's  boat,  ' Hinoko  Maw? 
Osaki  San  (Otokichi's  daughter)  made  a  little 
flag  for  the  boat.  As  I  informed  you  already,  the 
cat  is  called  '  Spark/  and  her  little  eyes  burn  like 
sparks.  Sweet  word  to  everybody  at  home  from 
Papa.  July  25th." 

"  Little  Mama  :  Yesterday  we  had  a  real  big 
wave  of  the  height  of  summer  season.  Otokichi 
swam  with  Kazuo,  as  he  was  afraid  for  Kazuo  to 
go  alone.  The  sea  began  to  groan  terribly  since 
noon  ;  and  at  evening  the  billows  grew  bigger, 
and  almost  reached  the  stone  wall.  It  is  difficult 
to  swim  this  morning  also,  but  I  expect  that  the 
sea  will  be  calmer  in  the  afternoon. 

"  The  little  baby  sparrow  which  I  already 
wrote  you  about  had  been  pretty  strong  for  the 


Hearn  at  Yaidzu  95 

last  three  days  ;  but  under  the  sudden  change  of 
weather  it  was  taken  ill. 

"  Last  evening  Otokichi  bought  two  sharks. 
Kazuo  studied  their  shapes  carefully ;  and  it  was 
the  first  experience  for  him.  Otokichi  cooked 
nicely  for  our  supper  shark's  meat,  which  was 
white  and  excellent.  I  take  some  milk  in  the 
morning.  August  ist." 

"  Little  Mama  Sama :  The  weather  is  good 
always.  The  other  guest  at  Otokichi's  has  gone; 
I  am  glad  of  it.  Otokichi's  wife  is  ill,  and 
moved  to  Tetsu's  house.  I  believe  she  te  getting 
better.  Otoyo  called  on  us.  Her  husband,  I  am 
told,  was  called  to  the  front,  and  also  the  tobacco- 
shop  keeper  whom  you  know.  Now  Yaidzu  has 
sent  her  seventeen  soldiers  out  to  Manchuria. 

"  To-day  the  sea  is  high,  but  rather  calm.  Kazuo 
and  Iwao  swam  with  their  Papa.  Iwao  is  im 
proving  in  swimming  ;  he  has  learned  how  to  float 
well.  I  am  sure  he  will  soon  master  the  art 
thoroughly.  I  felt  so  hot  and  lazy ;  but  Papa's 
belly  like  Hotei  Sama  (the  big-bellied  god  of 
comfort)  is  growing  rather  small. 

"  The  festival  is  held  to-day. '  Yarei,  yare,  Hay  a? 
we  hear  the  musical  voice.  The  sacred  car  of  the 


96         Lafcadio  Hearn  in  Japan 

festival  I  expect  to  pass  by  the  house  this  after 
noon.  Sweet  word  to  Kiyoshi,  and  kisses  to  'Aba, 
Aba'  (so  he  called  Suzuko,  his  last  girl,  as  she 
muttered  '  Aba,  Aba').  From  their  Papa.  August 
1 3th." 

"  Little  Mama  :  We  had  an  extra  last  night 
Great  victory.  We  had  our  own  celebration  here, 
drinking  lemonade,  and  eating  ice.  But  we  had 
no  other  extra  after  that.  To-day  we  had  a  little 
wave,  but  plenty  of  jelly-fishes.  We,  Kazuo, 
Niimi  and  I,  were  bitten  by  them.  Last  night  we 
took  a  short  walk,  and  went  to  the  shrine  of  the 
Yamatodake  god.  Kazuo  caught  a  black  dragon 
fly.  We  have  too  many  fleas  here,  but  not  many 
mosquitoes.  The  boys  are  happy.  Otokichi  always 
goes  with  them  into  the  water.  Iwao  is  learn 
ing  how  to  swim,  but  it  is  rather  difficult  as  the 
waves  are  pretty  big.  The  road  toward  Wada  has 
been  ruined  by  the  rush  of  waves.  Osemi  (big 
cicada)  is  singing.  I  think  Kiyoshi  must  be  lone 
some  at  home.  Kisses  to  'Aba,  Aba'  from  Papa. 
August  1 5th." 

"  Little  Mama  :  The  weather  is  fine  lately,  but 
there  are  large  waves.  Kazuo  is  always  happy. 


Hearn  at  Yaidzu  97 

Otetsu's  baby  grows  big  and  strong.  It  tumbles 
down,  and  often  tries  to  fly.  '  Osemi  '  sings 
only  at  morning,  and  not  when  the  sun  is 
very  hot.  It  is  not  like  the  cicada  at  Okubo 
Mura.  Papa  and  his  boy  grow  perfectly  brown. 

"  I  fancy  that  Okubo  Mura  must  be  fine  with 
the  new  leaves  o£  the  banana  tree,  and  also  with 
the  new  bamboo  leaves. 

"  Tsukutsukuboshi"  (a  kind  of  cicada),  I  think, 
must  be  singing  in  the  home  garden.  Sweet 
words  to  everybody  at  home.  August  i6th." 

"  Little  Mama  :  Your  welcome  letter  at  hand. 
It  reached  me  this  morning  to  my  delight,  and  I 
can  not  explain  my  joy  with  it  in  my  Japanese. 
You  must  never  think  of  danger  which  might  occur 
to  your  boy ;  I  hope  you  do  not  worry  about  him. 
I  haven't  yet  gone  to  sea  at  night  this  year. 
Otokichi  and  Niimi  take  good  care  of  Kazuo.  He 
is  perfectly  safe  although  he  often  swims  in  deep 
water.  He  is  so  afraid  of  the  jelly-fishes  this 
summer,  but  he  swims  and  plays  all  the  same. 
It  was  such  a  lovely  thing,  this  charm  of  the 
Narita  temple.  ^1  feel  lonely  sometimes.  I  wish 
I  could  see  your  sweet  face.  It  is  difficult  to 
sleep  on  account  of  the  many  fleas.  But  as  I  have 


98         Lafcadio  Hearn  in  Japan 

a  delightful  swim  in  the  morning,  I  usually  forget 
the  misery  of  the  night.  I  have  taken  a  litlle  hand 
bath  in  a  ridiculously  little  tub  the  last  two  or  three 
evenings.  Good  words  to  everybody  at  home, 
from  Papa.  August  i/th." 

"  Little  Mama  :  Yesterday  we  went  to  Wada, 
where  we  had  our  lunch ;  and  there  I  taught 
Kazuo.  He  was  delighted  to  catch  the  crabs. 
Iwao  is  biginning  to  learn  how  to  swim.  The 
house  at  Wada  has  been  mended  a  little.  The 
tea  we  have  there  is  always  good  ;  and  I  am  told 
that  the  tea  is  home-made,  which  might  be  the 
reason  for  its  excellence.  Fuji  was  seen  clearly 
last  evening.  We  cannot  swim  this  morning  as 
the  sea  is  so  high.  It  was  so  hot,  last  night,  we 
could  not  shut  the  doors.  But  the  weather  is 
always  good.  Iwao  let  his  crabs  walk  on  the 
roofs  of  Otokichi's  house ;  and  they  walked  and 
walked.  During  the  night  those  crabs  tried  to 
bite  into  our  box  of  soap,  but  it  was  beyond 
their  power  to  open  the  tin  cover.  How  sorry ! 
From  Papa.  August  2Oth." 

"Little  Mama:  Otokichi  gave  us  plenty  of  pears 
in  a  tray  yesterday  as  it  was  the  day  of  Bon.  I 


Hearn  at  Yaidzu  gg 

believe  it  was  to  thank  you  for  your  gift  of  the 
charm  the  other  day.  ,,,  We  went  to  Wada  to-day 
and  had  lunch  there.  Iwao  learns  well  how  to 
swim ;  and  he  has  no  fear  whatever,  and  takes 
delight  in  the  deeper  water.  He  will  soon  be  a 
fine  swimmer.  Otokichi  is  very  kind  to  us.  We 
have  no  big  wave,  the  sea  being  calm ;  the 
colors  of  the  sky  and  Fuji  mountain  are  per 
fectly  lovely.  And  there  is  no  speck  of  cloud. 
Otokichi  has  a  bright  little  boy  as  helper,  and  he 
calls  him  Kumakichi.  The  boy  is  lovely.  Iwao 
is  really  black  now,  hard  to  explain  ;  and  you 
will  not  know  him  when  you  see  him.  The  boys 
catch  dragon-flies  and  grasshoppers,  they  laugh, 
they  gather  stones,  they  play  cards,  they  eat  much 
and  sleep  well.  Papa  is  splendid,  too.  But  he 
cannot  walk  on  the  stones  of  the  shore  barefooted. 
I  wear  straw  sandals  when  I  go  to  Wada,  and 
strange  shoes  Otokichi  made  when  I  swim. 
Sweet  words  to  the  old  woman  and  children  at 
home,  from  Papa.  August  2ist." 

"  Little  Mama  Sama :  Your  sweet  letter  and 
magazines  at  hand.  I  thank  you  for  them.  Last 
night  I  finished  my  reading  of  proofs  of  my 
American  book,  and  also  of  that  of  Mr.  Takada's 


ioo       Lafcadio  Hearn  in  Japan 

article.  And  I  sent  them  out  by  mail  this  morn 
ing.  Last  night  we  had  a  little  walk,  and  dropped 
into  the  shooting  gallery  together.  The  target  is 
called  Tort  Arthur';  and  there  stands  a  figure  of 
a  Russian  soldier. 

"  Iwao  hit  it,  and  made  '  Port  Arthur'  fall.  '  I 
have  taken  it/  Iwao  exclaimed  in  a  big  voice. 

"  Then  we  went  to  the  ice-shop  which  you 
know.  Otoyo  San  is  helping  in  the  shop  as  a 
waitress.  There  in  the  street  right  before  the 
shop,  are  chairs  and  one  table  put  out.  Hurried 
to  catch  the  mail-hour.  Gomen,gomen  /  Yakumo 
Koizumi.  August  22d." 

Little  Mama :  Last  night  we  had  a  great  katsuo- 
fishing.  The  boat  belonging  to  Tetsu's  hus 
band,  with  the  other  five 
boats,  returned  at  evening,  g 
And  all  the  people  helped  '" 
them.  There  in  the  Tetsu's 
boat  were  one  thousand  seven  hundred  katsuo 
fishes.  One  fish  is  sold  for  twenty  sen.  Under 
the  torch-light  the  people  are  landing  the  fishes 
from  the  boats.  It  is  so  interesting  to  see  them. 

"  The  jelly-fishes  are  perfectly  terrible  this 
morning.  Papa  was  bitten  by  them.  The  sea  is 


Hearn  at  Yaidzu 


101 


as  a  Hell  on  their  account.  I  do  not  like  them 
at  all.  However,  the  weather  is  fine.  We  went 
to  take  a  walk  with  the  boys  last  night,  and  we 
heard  the  frogs  singing.  The  boys  are  so  sweet. 
Niimi  is  kind  and  good  to  them.  In  one  word, 
everything  is  first-rate,  except  those  jelly-fishes. 
Good-bye,  Mama  Sama.  Sweet  words  to  every 
body  at  home.  From  Papa.  August  23rd." 


"  Little  Mama :  Yesterday  it  was  so  hot ; 
thermometer  rose  to  91  degrees.  However, 
the  winds  blew  from  the  sea  at  night.  And  this 
morning  the  waves  are  s®  high.  I  only  took  a 
walk.  Otoyo  gave  the  boys  plenty  of  pears. 
Last  evening  Kazuo  and  Iwao  went 
to  a  shooting  gallery  for  fun.  We 
drank  soda  and  ginger  ale,  and 
also  ate  ice. 

"  Iwao  has  finished  his  first 
reader ;  it  seems  that  learning  is 
not  hard  for  his  little  head  at  all. 
He  studied  a  great  deal  here.  And 
he  is  learning  from  Mr.  Niimi  how 
to  write  Japanese  characters. 

"  Just  this    moment    I    received 
your  big  letter.     I  am  very  glad  to  hear  how  you 


102       Lafcadio  Hearn  in  Japan 


treated  the  snake  you  mentioned.  You  were  right 
not  allowing  the  girls  to  kill  it.  They  only  fear  as 
they  don't  understand  that  it  never  does  any 
harm.  I  believe  it  must  be  a  friend  of  Kami 
Sama  in  our  bamboo  bush.  Mr.  Papa  and  others 
wish  to  see  Mama's  sweet  face.  Good  words  to 
everybody  at  home.  Yakumo.  August  24th." 

Anybody  who  has  read  "  Otokichi's  Daruma  " 
in  A  Japanese  Miscellany  will  know  that  the 
good  man  Otokichi  set  a  red  image  of  Daru 
ma  on  the  Kamidana  or  the  Shelf  of  the  Gods,  in 
his  shop.  Hearn  observed  : 

"  But  I  was  rather  startled  by  the  peculiar  as 
pect  of  Otokichi's  Daruma,  which  had  only  one 
eye, — a  large  and  formidable  eye  that  seemed  to 
glare  through  the  dusk  of  the  shop  like  the  eye  of 
a  great  owl.  It  was  the  right  eye,  and  was  made 
of  glazed  paper.  The  socket  of  the  left  eye  was 
a  white  void," 

And  the  following  conversation  between  Hearn 
and  Otokichi  ensued : 

"  'Otokichi  San  ! — did  the  children  knock  out 
the  left  eye  of  Daruma  Sama  !' 

"  'He,  he,  /'  sympathetically  chuckled  Otokichi, 
— 'he  never  had  a  left  eye.' 


Hearn  at  Yaidzu  103 

"  'Was  he  made  that  way  ?'  I  asked. 

"  'Hef  responded  Otokichi, — as  he  swept  this 
long  knife  soundlessly  through  the  argent  body, 
'  the  folk  here  make  only  blind  Daruma,  he  had 
no  eyes  at  all.  I  made  the  right  eye  for  him  last 
year, — after  a  day  of  great  fishing.' 

"  'But  why  not  have  given  him  both  eyes  ?'  I 
queried,  'he  looks  so  unhappy  with  only  one 
eye  !'  " 

And  Hearn  was  happy  to  conclude  the  tale  of 
Otokichi's  Daruma  as  follows  : 

"  I  was  up  and  dressed  by  half  past  three  the 
next  morning,  in  order  to  take  an  early  express 
train  ;  but  even  at  that  ghostly  hour  I  found  a 
warm  breakfast  awaiting  me  down-stairs,  and 
Otokichi's  little  brown  daughter  ready  to  serve 
me.  .  .  .  As  I  swallowed  the  final  bowls  of 
warm  tea,  my  gaze  involuntarily  wandered  in  the 
direction  of  the  household  gods  whose  tiny  lamps 
were  still  glowing.  Then  I  noticed  that  a  light 
was  burning  also  in  front  of  Daruma  ;  and  almost 
in  the  same  instant  I  perceived  that  Daruma  was 
looking  straight  at  me — WITH  TWO  EYES  !" 

Mrs.  Hearn  told  me  that  it  was  one  of  the 
greatest  delights  of  his  life  at  Otokichi's  every 
year  to  create  the  left  eye  of  Daruma  with  his 


104       l^afcadio  Hearn  in  Japan 

generous  payment  on  the  evening  of  his  departure. 

To-day  I  observed  a  Daruma  with  the  left  eye 
void  on  the  shelf  of  Otokichi's  household  shrine. 
And  I  wondered  when  another  Lafcadio  Hearn 
would  come  here  to  fill  up  its  left  eye.  Indeed, 
Daruma  San  must  be  unhappy  with  only  one  eye. 

And  to  be  sure,  the  good  man  Otokichi,  too, 
would  like  to  see  both  of  its  eyes  opened  wide. 


V 


MR.  OTANI  AS  HEARN'S  LITERARY 
ASSISTANT  * 

IT  was  in  September,  1896,  (Meiji  29th)  that  we 
both  entered  the  Imperial  University  of  Tokyo ; 
I  as  a  student  and  Mr.  Lafcadio  Hearn  as  a 
lecturer  on  English  literature,  which  study  I  was 
going-  to  pursue.  I  was  the  first  caller  in  his 
temporary  Tokyo  house  at  Tatsuoka  Cho  of 
Hongo  district,  as  he  told  me  when  I  called  on 
him  on  the  9th  of  the  same  month  ;  and  again  I 
called  on  him  on  the  I3th,  and  again  on  the  i5th 
when  he  made  me  promise  to  become  his  liter 
ary  assistant,  (He  who  hitherto,  since  a  day 
of  September,  1890,  had  been  my  beloved  teacher 
at  Matsue,  now  became  my  patron.)  I  did  not 
work  much  that  year,  but,  if  I  remember  rightly, 

*  Mr.  Masanobu  Otani  wrote  about  him  in  the  Myojo, 
November  1904,  and  in  "  Bungo  Koizumi  Yokumo "  (the 
Lafcadio  Hearn  Memorial  Number)  of  the  Teikoku  Bungaku, 
also  November,  1904, — the  magazine  of  the  literary  society 
of  the  Imperial  University;  this  article  is  a  translation  of 
some  parts  of  those  articles. 


106       Lafcadio  Hearn  in  Japan 

only  one  article  on  "  The  Student's  Life  in 
Tokyo,"  and  some  translations  from  the  shin- 
taishi  (new-styled  poems)  of  Professors  Toyama, 
Uyeda,  Inouye  and  others,  were  my  effort.  It 
was  decided  from  January  of  1897  that  I  should 
present  my  study  on  the  subject  he  wished 
every  month ;  and  "  the  Japanese  Policeman's 
Life "  was  the  first  subject  I  received.  And 
the  subject  for  February  was  "  An  Essay  on 
the  Lives  of  Priests  and  Nuns, — from  the  Time  of 
Childhood.  Suggestions  : — Reason  of  Choice  of  a 
Religious  Life — First  Duties — Education— Range 
of  Learning — Daily  Duties — Observance  of  Vows, 
etc. — Probable  Number  of  Priests  and  Nuns- 
Average  of  Life." 

He  wrote  me  under  the  date  Feb.  26th,  inform 
ing  me  of  the  subject  for  March,  which  was  "  A 
Collection  of  Poems  of  Students — (only  Meiji  of 
course) — and  especially  University  Students." 
There  were,  at  that  time,  not  so  many  students 
poets  of  shintaishi,  uta  and  hokku  as  to-day  ;  I  had 
no  small  difficulty  in  hunting  up  their  works  in 
college  publications  of  city  and  provinces.  He 
used  only  the  seventeen-syllable  hokku  from  my 
collections  for  his  "  Bits  of  Poetry  "  in  "In  Ghostly 
Japan"  The  May  subject  was  announced  in  a 


Mr.  Otani  107 


letter  again  to  be  "A  Collection  of  Japanese 
Proverbs  containing  Allusions  to  Buddhism."  As 
there  was  no  such  work  published,  I  made  my 
best  effort  in  the  Uyeno  and  University  libraries, 
and  the  result  was  better  than  I  expected  at  first, 
and  I  even  thought  that  I  had  collected  all  the 
proverbs  in  that  line.  Mr.  Hearn  was  much 
pleased,  and  used  the  material  for  "Japanese 
Buddhist  Proverbs"  in  his  "  In  Ghostly  Japan:* 
The  subject  for  June  was  about  the  short  popular 
songs  concerning  the  China- Japan  war ;  but  I 
do  not  know  where  he  used  my  collection  of  those 
songs. 

I  returned  home  to  the  province  of  Izumo  in 
•Jnly,  where  he  wrote  me  that  I   should  devote 
fully  two  months  to  investigating  with  my  per 
sonal    effort    and    inquiring  of   scholars    on    the 
following  subject : 

"  Inscriptions  and  Sculptures  in  Buddhist  Ceme 
teries. 

I — Inscriptions  upon  Sutpa. 

A    list    of    these    inscriptions    (i)    in    Chinese 

characters,  separately  ; — (2)  in  Romaji  under  the 

i  Chinese  characters  ; — (3)  in  literal  English  under 

the  Romaji ; — (4)  explanatory.     (Some  reference 


io8      Lafcadio  Hearn  in  Japan 

should  be  made  to  sect  usage.  Group  if  possible 
under  respective  sects — Shinshiu,  Zenshiu,  Tendai, 
Shingon,  etc.) 

II — Inscriptions  upon  Haka. 

Arrange  similarly.     Group  by  sects  if  possible. 

Ill — Sculptures — Carvings  of  Buddhist  Symbols 
in  Use  by  the  Different  Sects, — Swastika,  Lotos, 
etc., but  only  Sculptures  in  Graveyards" 

I  had  read  many  a  book  upon  the  sutpa  ;  and 
I  made  many  calls  to  the  priests  of  each  sect ;  and 
I  went  around  every  graveyard  in  Matsue 
during  one  month.  And  the  result  which  I  pre 
sented  to  Mr.  Hearn  to  his  delight  came  to  be 
used  as  the  material  for  his  "  Literature  of  the 
Dead"  in  "Exotics  and  Retrospectives:'  The 
subject  for  September  was  the  relation  of  Fuji 
Mountain  and  Shmtoism ;  and  my  essay  was  utiliz 
ed  somewhere  in  "  Fuji-no-yama  "  in  the  same 
book.  And  the  subject  for  October  was  :  "  Singing- 
insects  That  are  Kept  in  Cages.  ( What  kind  of 
music  they  make,— what  they  feed  on, — what 
beliefs  or  traditions  or  poems  refer  to  them, — what 
their  capture  and  sale  signifies  in  the  small  com 
merce  of  Tokyo,  etc.)"  From  newspapers,  books 
and  my  personal  experience  I  gathered  all  thd 
materials  upon  those  insects ;  when  my  writing 


Mr.  Otani  log 


was  presented  to  him,  his  pleasure  was  great ; 
and  he  used  it  as  the  material  for  his  "  Insect- 
Musicians." 

In  November  my  work  was  to  collect  old 
childrens'  songs  which  he  used  for  "  Songs  of 
Japanese  Children  "  in  "  A  Japanese  Miscellany  " 
"  Poems  on  Cicadas  and  Frogs  "  was  the  subject 
for  December.  The  materials  for  them  were 
considerable,  especially  for  frogs ;  I  presented 
him  also  the  translations  of  "  Keichu  Kushiu  " 
and  "  Zoku  Keichu  Kushiu "  edited  by  the 
hokku  poet  Roseki  Mizouchi.  He  was  delighted 
with  my  work  on  the  subject ;  his  study  on 
Frogs  in  his  "  Exotics  and  Retrospectives  "  relied 
on  it. 

The  subject  for  January,  1895,  was  "Poems 
on  the  Sound  of  Sea  and  Wind."  It  is  strange 
even  to  us  that  we  have  very  few  such  poems ; 
he  was  surprised  about  that,  of  course.  "  About 
Incenses,  and  also  the  Poems  on  Them  "  was  my 
February  work  which  was  used  for  his  "  Incense  " 
in  "  In  Ghostly  Japan"  I  was  given  in  March 
the  subject  of  the  deities  and  poems  attached  to  a 
Japanese  ink-stone  (suzuri\  which,  however,  was 
a  failure  as  I  could  find  nothing  at  all  about  the 
deities,  and  the  poems,  too,  were  extremely  poor. 


no      Lafcadio  Hearn  in  Japan 

The  subject  for  April  was  the  "  Buddhistic  Concep 
tion  of  Hell  "  and  chiefly,  a  description  of  it ;  and 
I  tried  my  best  with  it,  but  he  did  not  make  any 
use  of  my  effort  which,  however,  pleased  him. 
He  gave  me  the  subject  of  "  Kingio  "  (gold-fish) 
in  May ;  and  my  June  subject  was  the  Horai 
(elysium)  and  its  traditions  and  the  conceptions 
of  the  ancient  poets.  ^  The  subject  for  July  and 
August  was  "  Folklore  and  Mythology  of  Japan 
ese  Plants."  Chiefly  he  wanted  the  fruits  which 
bore  Buddhist  and  Shinto  appellations,  and  besides, 
he  wanted  to  have  the  flowers'  traditions,  also, 
the  animals,  fishes  and  insects  which  bore  Buddhist 
names.  And  if  I  had  time  enough,  he  said,  I 
should  write  an  "  essay  on  '  Ma,'— the  spirits  or 
goblins  who  are  supposed  to  urge  men  to  ac 
complish  certain  actions,  etc."  Relying  on  the 
encyclopedia  -  dictionaries  like  "  Genkai  "  and 
others,  I  worked  hard  during  my  summer  vaca 
tion  ;  for  his  "  Buddhist  Names  of  Plants  and 
Animals  "  in  "  A  Japanese  Miscellany  "  he  made 
good  utilization  of  my  investigation.  I  received 
the  subject  of  "  Footprints  of  the  Buddha  "  in 
September ;  from  many  Buddhist  books,  and  with 
the  help  of  two  or  three  priests  I  could  write  a 
good  enough  article  which  did  service  for  him  to- 


Mr.  Otani  in 


write  the  essay  of  the  same  title  in  "  In  Ghostly 
Japan." 

October  was  spent  collecting  the  Japanese 
ballads  which  he  used  for  "  Old  Japanese  Songs  " 
in  Shadoivings ;  about  Kanemaki  Odori-uta, 
"  Bell-wrapping- song"  (page  83  of  the  same  book) 
he  wrote  :  "  Replying  to  the  note  accompanying 
the  translation  of  the  ballads,  I  want  to  tell  you 
that  I  found  them  very  interesting.  The  '  Bell- 
wrapping-song  '  is  an  excellent  specimen  of  a  true 
ballad, — the  best  I  have  yet  seen,  with  its  curious 
burden  of  duplication  and  onomatopeia  .  .  .  " 
The  subject  for  November  was  poems  on  death  and 
graveyards ;  and  songs  with  refrains  were  for 
December.  He  wrote  me  :  "  Your  collection  of 
poems  this  month  interested  me  a  great  deal  in  a 
new  way, — the  songs  separately  make  only  a 
small  appeal  to  the  imagination,  but  the  tone  and 
feeling  of  the  mass  are  most  remarkable,  and 
give  me  a  number  of  new  ideas  about  the 
character  of  the  '  folkwork  '...."  It  was 
on  the  29th  of  the  same  month  that  I  called  on 
him  at  Tomihisa  Cho,  Ushigome  district,  and 
presented  him  with  a  gift  from  my  mother,  for 
which  he  wrote  me  :  "I  think  that  a  better  pres 
ent,  or  one  which  could  give  me  sincere  pleasure, 


ii2      Lafcadio  Hearn  in  Japan 

will  never  be  received.  It  is  a  most  curious 
thing,  that  strange  texture, — and  a  most  romantic 
thing  also  in  its  way,  —  seeing  that  the  black 
speckling  that  runs  through  the  whole  wool  is 
made  by  characters  of  letters  or  poems  or  other 
texts,  written  long  ago.  And  I  must  assure  you 
that  I'll  always  prize  it — not  only  because  I  like  it, 
but  particularly  because  your  mother  wove  it.  I 
am  going  to  have  it  made  into  a  winter  kimono 
for  my  own  use,  which  I  shall  always  wear, 
according  to  season,  in  my  study  room.  Surely 
it  is  just  the  kind  of  texture  which  a  man  of  letters 
ought  to  wear "  "  Two  most  wel 
come  gifts  from  a  young  poet  of  my  literary  class" 
(page  157  of  " Shadozvings")  meant  my  mother's 
present  of  the  piece  of  wool  and  the  collection 
of  poems. 

The  January  of  1899  was  used  to  collect  more 
songs  with  refrains,  and  also  the  popular  love- 
songs  ;  and  February  and  March  were  spent  in 
translating  the  Shingaku  and  Saibaraku,  as  his 
desire  was  chiefly  for  the  ancient  poems,  except 
those  of  Manyo ;  and  he  used  them  for  "  Old 
Japanese  Songs "  in  his  "  Shadowings"  I  re 
ceived  the  subject  of  wtoz-drama  for  April ;  pre 
sented  the  translations  of  Yuya  and  the  half  of 


Mr.  Otani  113 


Dojqji.  He  wrote  me  :  "I  had  no  idea,  however, 
when  I  suggested  the  utai,  of  the  enormous  labor 
that  would  be  required  for  a  few  of  these  for 
Western  readers.  It  will  be  very  hard  indeed  to 
do  it ; — for  the  mere  fact  of  the  translation  being 
done  is  only  the  faintest  outline  of  the  work. 
However,  later  on,  I  may  try  one  specimen,  and 
when  you  have  leisure,  I  shall  be  glad  to  see  the 
rest  of  the  Dojoji  piece.  That  Yuya  would  re 
quire,  for  an  English  reader,  two  pages  of  clearly 
printed  notes  to  every  half  page  of  the  text.  I 
fear  that  nobody  would  care  to  read  a  thing  in 
that  shape ;  yet,  without  a  knowledge  of  every 
Buddhist  allusion,  the  poetry  of  the  composition 
should  not  be  felt.  .  .  ."  It  is  true  that  my 
translation  could  not  succeed  in  making  itself 
understood  in  spite  of  the  great  labor  I  had  under 
gone.  It  is  sad  for  literature,  however,  that  he 
died  without  touching  his  marvellous  hand  to  it. 

I  was  asked  in  May  to  collect  the  Japanese 
women's  names  according  to  their  ethical  and 
aesthetic  relations.  I  had  the  lists  of  students  of 
many  girls'  schools  ;  and  besides,  an  essay  on  that 
subject  was  written  by  Mr.  Tetsuzo  Okada  in 
some  philosophical  magazine ;  with  these  helps  I 
was  able  to  write  one  article  to  my  satisfaction, 


H4      Lafcadio  Hearn  in  Japan 

and  he  used  the  material  I  offered  him  for 
"Japanese  Female  Names,"  in  his  "Shadowings" 
My  writing  on  Semi  (cicada)  in  June  was  develop 
ed  by  his  magic,  and  he  put  it  in  his  "  Shadoiv- 
ings  "  also.  The  month  of  July  was  the  time  of 
my  graduation  from  the  University  ;  and  then  I 
stopped  working  for  him  as  his  literary  assistant. 
However,  I  was  asked  to  work  now  and  then 
after  that,  and  I  was  only  too  glad  to  do  any 
service  for  him.  I  confess  that  it  was  no  easy 
task  to  study  a  new  subject  for  each  month,  and 
to  write  it  up  in  English  which  was  far  from  my 
command  ;  but  aside  from  the  material  assistance 
he  gave  for  my  work,  without  which,  in  fact,  I 
am  sure  I  could  not  have  finished  my  three 
years  at  the  University,  it  was  a  great  education 
in  itself.  He  wrote  me  a  few  days  before  my 
graduation  : 

"  .  .  I  have  gone  somewhat  into  particulars, 
only  because  I  want  you  to  feel  that  you  have 
really  paid  for  your  own  education  like  a  man, 
and  have  no  obligation  of  any  sort  as  far  as  I  am 
concerned.  .  .  The  work  must  have  sometimes 
been  tiresome.  But  the  results  to  yourself  have 
not  been  altogether  bad." 

I  had  numerous  occasions  to  be  deeply  impress- 


Mr.  Otani  115 


ed  by  his  depth  of  sympathy  under  which  I 
always  thought  he  was  my  spiritual  comforter 
and  encourager.  Here  I  have  a  letter  written  by 
hirr  when  I  was  confined  to  a  sick-bed  in  my 
boarding  house  more  than  one  month ;  in  part 
he  said  : 

"  .  .  A  little  bodily  sickness  may  come  to 
anybody.  Many  students  die,  many  go  mad, 
many  do  foolish  things  and  sometimes  ruin  them 
selves  for  life.  You  are  good  at  your  studies, 
and  mentally  in  sound  health,  and  steady  in  your 
habits — three  conditions  which  ought  to  mean 
success,  unless  you  fail  in  them.  That  is  not 
unfortunate. 

"  Finally,  you  have  good  eyes  and  a  clear  brain. 
How  many  thousands  have  to  fail  for  want  of 
these  ?  You  are  certainly  not  unfortunate. 

"  When  I  was  a  boy  of  sixteen,  although  my 
blood-relations  were — some  of  them — very  rich, 
no  one  would  pay  anything  to  help  me  finish  my 
education.  I  had  to  become  what  you  never  have 
had  to  become, — a  servant.  I  partly  lost  my 
sight.  I  had  two  years  of  sickness  in  bed.  I  had 
no  one  to  help  me.  Yet  I  was  brought  up  in 
a  rich  home,  surrounded  with  every  luxury  of 
Western  life. 


n6      Lafcadio  Hearn  in  Japan 

"  So,  my  dear  boy,  do  not  lie  there  in  your  bed 
and  fret,  and  try  to  persuade  yourself  that  you 
are  unfortunate.  You  are  a  lucky  boy,  and  a  pet, 
and  likely  to  succeed  in  life. 

My  thought  of  Mr.  Hearn  carried  me  back,  at 
once,  to  his  beloved  Matsue  of  Izumo  where  he 
stepped  first  some  time  in  the  month  of  August 
1890.  It  must  have  been  his  idea,  of  course,  to 
begin  his  study  of  Japan  and  the  Japanese  in  her 
oldest  province,  and  so  no  hardship  of  travel 
daunted  him  ;  he  looked  forward  to  Matsue,  "  the 
chief  city  of  the  province  of  the  gods  "  as  he  wrote 
afterward,  with  delightful  anxiety  and  new  hope. 
I  do  not  know  when  he  left  Yokohama  ;  but  he 
told  me  that  he  had  seen  a  Bon  Odori  at 
Shimoichi,  following  the  highway  of  Tottori 
Kaido  after  leaving  Okayama  which  he  reached 
by  a  train  ;  and  he  took,  then,  a  steamboat  from 
Yoneko  of  the  Hoki  province,  seeing,  at  his 
right,  the  Miho  no  Seki  promontory  of  the 
Shimane  peninsula,  and,  at  his  left,  the  lovely 
view  of  the  Sodeshi  ga  Ura  coast ;  and  when  he 
crossed  a  sort  of  a  sea,  he  was  already  in 
the  stream  of  the  Ohashigawa  river  by  which 
Matsue  is  built  I  remember  that  it  was  the  2nd 
of  September  when  he  appeared  first  in  the  school ; 


Mr.  Otani  117 


from  that  day,  I  had  the  rare  fortune  to  be  put 
under  his  care  as  one  of  the  students  of  the  fourth- 
year  of  the  Middle  School  of  Shimane  Ken.  He 
impressed  us  with  his  earnestness  and  sympathy ; 
hitherto,  we  had  only  a  slight  acquaintance  with 
a  missionary,  and  we  found  such  a  pleasing 
change  in  him.  He  was  patient  to  correct  our 
English  accent  carefully  ;  and  he  went  minute 
ly  over  our  compositions,  and  it  was  our  great 
est  joy  that  he  wrote  even  a  criticism  on 
them.  One  of  his  earliest  writings  in  my  posses 
sion  is  a  sort  of  criticism  he  wrote  for  my  com 
position  called  "  The  Book,"  in  which  i  said  that 
there  must  be  a  book-maker  to  produce  a  book, 
and  also,  God  to  create  the  world.  I  further  said 
that  as  the  civilized  Europeans  are  Christians, 
the  country  of  non-believers  of  the  Christian 
faith  cannot  be  called  civilized.  Here  is  what 
he  wrote  on  my  composition  : 

"  (i)  This  argument  (called  by  Christians 
Paley's  Argument)  is  absurdly  false.  Because  a 
book  is  made  by  a  book-maker,  or  a  watch  by  a 
watch-maker,  it  does  not  follow  at  all  that  suns 
and  worlds  are  made  by  an  intelligent  designer. 
We  only  know  of  books  and  watches  as  human 
productions.  Even  the  substance  of  a  book  or  a 


n8       Lafcadio  Hearn  in  Japan 

watch  we  do  not  know  the  nature  of.  What  we 
do  know  logically  is  that  Matter  is  eternal,  and 
also  the  Power  which  shapes  it  and  changes  it. 
(2)  Another  false  argument.  At  one  time,  the 
Greeks  and  the  Egyptians,  both  highly  civilized 
people,  believed  in  different  gods.  Later,  the 
Romans  and  the  Greeks,  although  highly  civil 
ized,  accepted  a  foreign  belief.  Later  still,  these 
civilized  peoples  were  conquered  by  races  of  a 
different  faith.  The  religion  of  Mahomet  was 
at  one  time  that  of  the  highest  civilization.  At 
another  time  the  religion  of  India  was  the  religion 
of  the  highest  civilization.  It  is  very  doubtful 
whether  the  civilization  of  a  people  has  any 
connection,  whatever,  with  their  religion. — In 
Christian  countries,  moreover,  the  most  learned 
men  do  not  believe  in  Christianity ;  and  the 
Christian  religion  is  divided  into  countless  sects, 
which  detest  each  other.  No  European  scientist 
of  note, — no  philosopher  of  high  rank, — no  really 
great  man  is  a  Christian  in  belief." 

No  other  teacher,  I  am  sure,  could  take  such 
pains  for  a  slip  of  composition  of  a  mere  boy  as 
I  was  then  ;  he  was  most  serious  and  painstaking 
for  anything  he  undertook  as  in  his  literature. 
I  believe  that  it  was  from  his  idea  to  draw  out 


Mr.  Otani  ug 


our  thoughts  and  imaginations  that  he  gave  us 
such  composition-subjects  as  "  ghost/'  "  peony," 
"fox,"  "cuckoo"  "tortoise,"  "firefly"  and 
others.  Read  page  460  and  somewhere  of 
"Glimpses  of  Unfamiliar  fapan"  under  the  title  of 
"  From  the  Diary  of  a  Teacher."  The  page  461 
is  about  the  conversation  which  I  had  with  him 
in  the  class-room. 

About  that  time,  we  invited  him  to  a  certain 
Buddhist  temple  of  Tera  Machi  (Temple  Street) 
when  we  had  a  musical  entertainment.  I  could 
then  play  a  Chinese  instrument.  He  sat  as  we 
did  from  two  o'clock  until  evening  attentively; 
and  we  were  surprised  to  see  him  not  even 
palsied  in  his  legs  as  any  other  foreigner  would 
be  after  even  a  half  hour's  experience.  "  Ojo  and 
Batto  "  in  the  pages  of  "  From  the  Diary  of  a 
Teacher  "  were  the  program  of  that  day.  He 
was  a  perfectly  delightful  personality  to  his 
friends,  at  least  as  a  Mr.  Hearn  at  Matsue  ;  he 
tried  to  absorb,  when  off  duty  from  his  school, 
everything  Japanese  and  strange ;  and  he  with 
his  student  boys  made  many  little  excursions 
almost  everywhere  about  the  city.  And  he  never 
failed  in  attending  any  meeting  or  dinner  party 
which  his  fellow-teachers  happened  to  hold.  The 


i2o      Lafcadio  Hearn  in  Japan 


first  two  or  three  pages  of  a  "  Dancing  Girl  "  of 
the  same  book  were  from  a  personal  experience 
he  enjoyed  on  one  of  those  occasions.  He  made 
a  visit  to  my  house  on  the  Setsnbun  night  of 
1891,  and  saw  Oniyarai  (Devil-be-out-Feast) 
sitting  in  my  study  ;  and  he  used  it  for  "  Two 
Strange  Festivals."  He  insisted  on  my  accom 
panying  him  to  his  place  (he  was  still  staying 
at  one  of  the  Japanese  hotels,  not  being  married 
yet) ;  and  he  thanked  me  offering  me  a  glass 
of  whisky. 

As  he  wrote  on  page  443,  I  was  collecting  at 
that  time  varieties  of  marine  plants  ;  it  is  true  that 
I  had  no  small  interest  in  botany  ;  and  perhaps 
that  was  the  reason  he  advised  me  to  take  up 
science  as  my  study,  or  perhaps  his  sharp  eye 
clearly  saw  then  that  I  was  unfitted  to  follow 
literature.  However,  against  his  advice,  I  glided 
into  literature.  I  received  his  letter  dated  March 
3rd  1894,  when  I  was  a  student  at  the  Ky*to 
Higher  Middle  School : 

"  I  think  you  ought  not  to  study  what  would 
not  be  of  practical  use  to  you  in  after-life.  I  am 
always  glad  to  hear  of  a  student  studying  en 
gineering,  architecture,  medicine  (if  he  has  the 
particular  moral  character  which  medicine  re- 


Mr.  Otani  121 


quires), — or  any  branch  of  applied  science.  I  do 
not  like  to  see  all  the  fine  boys  turning  to  the 
study  of  law,  instead  of  to  the  study  of  science  or 
technology.  If  you  were  my  son,  or  brother,  I 
would  say  to  you,  '  Study  science — study  for 
a  practical  profession  '.  .  .  Suppose  you  were 
obliged  suddenly  to  depend  entirely  on  your  own 
unassisted  power  to  make  money, — would  it  not 
then  be  necessary  to  do  something  practical  ?  . 
Hundreds  of  students  leave  the  university  without 
any  real  profession,  and  without  any  practical 
ability  to  make  themselves  useful.  All  cannot 
become  teachers,  or  lawyers,  or  clerks.  They 
become  soshi,  or  they  become  officials,  or  they 
do  nothing  of  any  consequence.  Their  whole 
education  has  been  of  no  real  use  to  them, 
because  it  has  not  been  practical.  Men  can 
succeed  in  life  only  by  their  ability  to  do 
something,  and  three  fourths  of  the  university- 
students  can  do  nothing.  Their  education  has 
been  only  ornamental .  .  ." 

When  I  informed  him  afterward  that  I  had 
put  my  name  in  the  literature  department  upon 
removing  to  the  Second  Higher  Middle  School  at 
Sendai,  he  wrote  me  again  under  date  of  March 
8th  1895  : 


122      Lafcadio  Hearn  in  Japan 

"  .  .  .1  am  really  sorry  that  you  should  not 
have  taken  a  scientific  course.  Literature  is  a 
subject  that  you  can  study  best  outside  of  schools 
and  colleges.  But  science  is  not.  A  scientific 
profession  might  enable  you  to  do  great  things 
for  your  country,  and  in  any  case  it  would  make 
you  practically  independent.  I  cannot  imagine 
that  literature  will  ever  be  more  than  a  pleasure 
to  you.  Even  in  England  it  is  extremely  difficult 
to  live  by  literature,  or  to  obtain  distinction  by 
it .  .  ." 

And  I  found  also  the  following  words  in  his 
letter  dated  June  28th  of  the  same  year  : 

"  Don't  forget  at  least  to  think  about  my  advice 
to  take  a  scientific  course,  if  you  can.  The 
future  is  likely  to  offer  so  little  to  literary  ability 
of  any  kind  for  another  half  century,  that  I  fear 
literature  cannot  be  of  much  use  to  you.  Japan, 
for  at  least  fifty  years  to  come,  must  turn  all  her 
talents  to  practical  matters, — even  her  arts.  It 
will  be  like  America  before  the  present  century. 
The  practical  man — botanist,  chemist,  engineer, 
architect,  will  always  be  independent  .  . 

The  26th  of  October  1891  was  Mr.  Hearn's 
last  day  of  teaching  at  Matsue's  Jinjo  Chugakko  ; 
we  had  a  farewell  banquet  in  his  honor  in  the 


Mr.  Otani  123 


school  hall.  I  read  a  farewell  address  in 
behalf  of  all  the  students  as  it  was  written  in 
his  "  Sayonara "  of  "  Grimpses  of  Unfamiliar 
Japan"  And  every  word  of  "  Sayonara  "  is 
true ;  in  reading  it  the  old  sad  day  of  parting  with 
him  returns  to  my  mind  again.  He  wrote  :  "And 
now,  as  I  look  at  all  these  pleasant  faces  about 
me,  I  cannot  but  ask  myself  the  question  :  '  Could 
I  have  lived  in  the  exercise  of  the  same  profession 
for  the  same  length  of  time  in  any  other  country, 
and  have  enjoyed  a  similar  unbroken  experience 
of  human  goodness  ?  '  From  each  and  all  of 
these  I  have  received  only  kindness  and  courtesy. 
Not  one  has  ever,  even  through  inadvertence, 
addressed  to  me  a  single  ungenerous  word.  As  a 
teacher  of  more  than  five  hundred  boys  and  men, 
I  have  never  even  had  my  patience  tried.  I 
wonder  if  such  an  experience  is  possible  only  in 
Japan." 

And  further  he  wrote  : 

"  Magical  indeed  the  charm  of  this  land,  as  of 
a  land  veritably  haunted  by  gods  :  so  lovely  the 
spectral  delicacy  of  its  color, — so  lovely  the  forms 
of  its  hills  blending  with  the  forms  of  its  clouds, — 
so  lovely,  above  all,  those  long  trailings  and 
bandings  of  mists  which  make  its  altitudes  appear 


124      Lafcadio  Hearn  in  Japan 

to  hang  in  air.  A  land  where  sky  and  earth  so 
strangely  intermingle  that  what  is  reality  may 
not  be  distinguished  from  what  is  illusion, — that 
all  seems  a  mirage,  about  to  vanish.  For  me, 
alas  !  it  is  about  to  vanish  forever." 

Indeed,  when  he  left  Matsue  of  the  Izumo 
province,  the  dearest  to  him  in  all  Japan,  only 
next  to  St  Pierre  of  Martinique  as  he  often 
remarked  to  me  afterward,  it  seems  that  his 
paradise  was  lost  never  to  be  regained. 


VI 


LAFCADIO  HEARN  IN  HIS  LECTURE 
ROOM 

"  WE  did  not  know  then,"  Mr.  Katsumi  Kuroita, 
o;ie  of  Hearn's  students  of  his  Kamamoto  period, 
writes,  "  that  he  was  a  writer  already  known  in 
America  ;  in  truth,  we  were  thinking  at  first  that 
he  was  a  common  foreign  teacher  of  English  like 
any  other.  But  it  did  not  take  long  to  find 
out  that  he  was  different  to  a  great  degree  from 
the  others  in  his  lectures  and  method  of  putting 
questions  for  us ;  and  we  soon  began  to  know  his 
no  small  fame  as  a  writer,  which  incited  our  de 
lightful  curiosity  and  strange  respect.  We  looked 
upon  him  as  one  with  special  distinction.  He 
impressed  us  from  the  very  first  with  his  peculiarity 
of  seeming  wrapped  in  silence,  and  yet  he  was  not 
lacking  in  tender  kindness.  We  were  most 
pleased  with  him.  i  There  was  one  reason  among 
others  to  be  delighted  with  him,  which  was  that 
he  lectured  in  clear  and  simple  language  that  even 
our  minds  found  it  easy  to  grasp.  Hitherto,  we 


126      Lafcadio  Hearn  in  Japan 

had  been  meeting  with  foreign  teachers  who 
awed  us,  and  whom  we  had  to  respect  from  a 
distance.  This  new  teacher  pleased  us  mightily.  I 
confess  that  our  study  in  those  days  was  not 
highly  advanced  in  literature  ;  but  his  lectures  on 
rhetoric  and  his  method  of  '  conversation  '  soon 
worked  a  magic.  When  we  reached  the  highest 
class,  he  gave  us  Latin  lessons  and  lectures  on 
English  literature,  in  which  he  introduced  us  to 
Shakespeare  with  whom,  though  we  had  heard  of 
him  of  course,  we  had  no  proper  acquaintance 
whatever.  It  was  the  last  day  of  the  second  term 
when  he  finished  his  Shakespeare  lectures,  and  as 
I  remember  even  now,  his  last  words  were  :  '  So, 
now,  my  lecture  on  Shakespeare  is  done,  and  the 
last  bell  of  the  second  term  has  rung/  His 
lectures  on  English  literature  filled  two  hours  a 
week  ;  he  began  with  Chaucer,  and  finished  with 
George  Eliott  whom  he  admired  tremendously. 
And  I  remember  that  he  talked  of  Tennyson 
before  George  Eliott.  He  used  to  write  down 
the  outline  of  his  day's  lecture  on  the  blackboard* 
and  his  language  was  simple  and  clear  as  I  said 
before.  We  had  no  difficulty  to  understand  him. 
The  subject  for  composition  was  rather  free ;  he 
simply  told  us  to  write  about  what  we  saw  or 


In  His  Lecture  Room          127 

experienced.  He  often  asked  us  to  write  a 
Japanese  folk-story.  And  to  each  composition 
he  gave  the  greatest  attention,  as  he  wrote  his  own 
criticism  beside  the  corrections  of  grammatical 
errors  and  changes  of  words.  Although  I 
cannot  admit  that  he  was  a  happy  man  in  those 
days,  it  was  certain  that  he  did  not  show  any 
feeling  of  hatred  toward  people.  We  did  not  hear 
any  story  of  his  misunderstanding  with  the  fellow- 
teachers  ;  and  as  I  remember,  Mr.  Akizuki,  the 
old  Chinese  scholar,  was  looked  upon  by  him 
with  special  reverence  ;  of  him  Mr.  Hearn  wrote 
somewhere  in  his  '  Out  of  the  East'  I  am  sure 
that  he  was  successful  as  a  teacher  in  his  own 
quiet  and  serious  sort  of  way." 

And  if  you  want  to  known  his  merit  as  a 
teacher,  and  sympathy  with  the  boys  at  the 
Matsue  school,  you  have  to  read  the  two  chapters 
of  "  Glimpses  of  Unfamiliar  Japan  :  "  "  From 
the  Diary  of  an  English  Teacher,"  and 
"  Sayonara. 

It  seems  to  me  that  there  was  some  misunder 
standing,  on  Hearn's  part,  about  his  resignation 
from  the  Imperial  University,  or  his  dismissal,  as 
he  wrote  to  his  friends  ;  and,  although  I  do  not 
believe  altogether  in  the  intrigue  of  the  other 


128      Lafcadio  Hearn  in  Japan 


professors  of  which  he  spoke  in  his  letters,  I  am 
sure  that  some  of  them  were  not  sympathetic. 
However,  his  hold  on  the  students'  minds  was 
wonderful  ;  soon  after  his  death,  the  Teikoku 
Bungaku,  the  literary  magazine  of  the  University, 
issued  the  "  Lafcadio  Hearn  Memorial  Number," 
the  articles  being  written  by  his  former  students  ; 
I  say  that  such  a  demonstration  of  their  lamenta 
tion  as  well  as  appreciation  was  unusual  in  our 
history  of  literature.  And  when  his  resignation 
from  the  University  was  known,  with  what 
sympathy  and  honesty  those  students  protested 
against  the  attitude  of  the  University ;  how  they 
tried  to  keep  him  with  them.  Their  hearts  were 
wounded  terribly  to  think  that  even  the  biggest 
school  of  Japan  could  not  afford  to  keep  one 
Hearn.  (Indeed,  I  dare  say  that  most  govern 
ment  schools  of  Japan  are  shabbily  narrow- 
minded  ;  their  formalism  is  perfectly  appalling.) 
They  thought  at  once  that  there  was  no  greater 
teacher  of  literature  than  Hearn  in  Japan. 

And  I  must  tell  you  that  he  used  to  give  the 
students  fifty  yen  for  the  best  graduation  essay, 
and  thirty  yen  for  the  second  best,  as  a  prize  for 
encouragement's  sake,  from  his  own  private 
pocket.  Such  a  thing  proves  his  great  interest  in 


In  His  Lecture  Room          129 

his  students ;  it  is  the  very  first  such  thing  known 
in  Japanese  school  history.  I  am  told  by  Mrs. 
Hearn  that  he  used  to  read  over  the  students' 
essays  three  or  four  times,  and  even  cry  over  the 
best  work  which  held  his  admiration. 

"  I  realized  my  deficiencies,"  Hearn  wrote  to 
Ellwood  Hendrick,  "  but  I  soon  felt  where  I 
might  become  strong,  and  I  taught  literature  as 
the  expression  of  emotion  and  sentiment, — as  the 
representation  of  life.  In  considering  a  poet  I 
tried  to  explain  the  quality  and  power  of  the 
emotion  that  he  produced.  In  short,  I  based  my 
teaching  altogether  upon  appeals  to  the  imagina 
tion  and  the  emotions  of  my  pupils, — and  they 
have  been  satisfied  (though  the  fact  may  signify 
little,  because  their  imagination  is  so  unlike  our 
own)."  Such  is  his  own  appraisal  of  his  work  in 
the  class-room ;  under  that  shade,  his  merit  as  a 
lecturer  on  English  literature  should  be  judged. 

Here  before  me  are  many  note-books  of  Mr. 
Uchigasaki  of  Waseda  University,  which  were 
taken  down  by  him  in  longhand  on  the  spot  of 
Hearn's  delivery.  The  subjects  embrace,  beside 
the  general  history  of  English  literature,  "  D  G. 
Rossetti  and  Christina  Rossetti,"  "Charles  Kingsley 
as  Poet,"  "  Metaphysical  Poetry  of  George  Mere- 


130       Lafcadio  Hearn  in  Japan 

dith,"  "  Carlyle,  Ruskin,  De  Quincey  and  Froude," 
"  Note  on  Mrs.  Browning,"  "  Foe's  Verse,"  "  Note 
on  Cowper,"  "  William  Morris,"  "  The  Resurrec 
tion,"  "  Tolstoi's  Theory  of  Art "  and  many 
others.  And  what  interests  me  more  than  others 
are  his  lectures  which  help  us  to  understand  his 
personality  and  convictions,  lectures  like  "Litera 
ry  Genius,"  "  Literary  Societies,"  "  The  Question 
of  the  Highest  Art,"  "  Insuperable  Difficulty," 
"  Literary  Economics  "  and  others. 

"  In  literature,"  he  remarks  in  '  Literary 
Genius,'  "  the  object  is  beauty  :  the  emotional 
nature  only  can  develop  literary  genius.  This 
genius  does  not  mean  exceptional  power  to  see  or 
to  think,  but  exceptional  power  to  feel.  Mathemat 
ical  genius  thinks  and  sees  ;  literary  genius  feels 
and  divines.  In  the  physical  system  of  such  a 
genius,  the  nervous  system  has  been  developed  to 
an  extent  which  an  ordinary  man  is  not  even 
capable  of  understanding.  Nothing  can  be  more 
foolish  than  to  suppose  that  all  men  feel  pleasure 
and  pain  in  exactly  the  same  way.  As  to  physical 
pain,  superficial,  you  must  have  observed  that 
some  persons  are  able  to  bear  it  much  better  than 
others.  But  it  would  be  quite  wrong  to  suppose 
that  is  only  because  one  man  has  a  stronger  will 


In  His  Lecture  Room          131 

and  greater  patience  than  other  man.  That  may 
have  something  to  do  with  certain  cases  ;  but  that 
is  not  contradicting  the  general  fact  that  the 
sensibility  to  pain  depends  upon  the  general  con 
dition  of  the  nervous  system.  And  the  same 
thing  is  true  of  moral  pain,  which  is  really 
physical  pain  also,  in  a  nervous  sense,  though  not 
in  a  superficial  sense.  The  misfortune  that  one 
man  laughs  at  may  result  in  making  a  much 
superior  man  insane.  Probably  there  are  no  two 
persons  in  the  whole  world  who  feel  the  same 
pleasure  or  the  same  pain  in  exactly  the  same  way. 
"  Now  take  the  type  of  the  man  of  genius  in 
whom  brain  has  been  developed  at  the  cost  of 
body — in  whom  the  nervous  system  has  a  delicacy 
and  a  sensitiveness  far  beyond  the  average  person, 
— and  imagine  the  result  to  him  of  the  struggle 
for  existence.  He  is,  as  I  have  already  said,  a 
kind  of  monster,  a  beautiful  monster  indeed,  but 
nevertheless  a  monster.  It  is  much  more  difficult 
for  him  to  control  his  feelings  than  it  is  for  the  aver 
age  man,  because  his  feelings  are  much  stronger, 
and  because  the  controlling  machinery  of  will  is 
much  less  developed  in  him  than  it  is  in  other 
men.  There  was  no  room  for  it.  He  finds  it 
much  more  difficult  than  others  to  resist  tempta- 


132       Lafcadio  Hearn  in  Japan 

tions  to  pleasure,  because  he  is  more  sensitive  to 
pleasure,  and  for  the  same  reason  he  finds  it  very 
much  harder  to  bear  pain.  His  pain  is  greater 
than  that  of  the  ordinary  man.  It  is  not  a  wonder 
at  all  that  so  many  men  of  genius  should  have 
been  morally  weak  ; — it  would  be  a  very  great 
wonder  if  they  were  not.  What  has  been  called 
their  degeneration  is  really  not  degeneration  so 
much  as  a  non-development  in  one  direction 
combined  with  excessive  development  in  an 
other." 

And  further  he  remarks  : 

"  The  great  genius,  in  spite  of  his  faults,  is 
always  the  great  teacher.  Superior  to  all  other 
men  in  one  particular  direction,  he  helps  by  his 
work  to  develop  the  minds  of  after-generations  in 
the  very  same  direction.  And  he  generally  does 
this  at  a  very  great  cost  of  personal  suffering. 
Perhaps  the  time  will  come  when  men  of  literary 
genius  will  be  quite  equal  to  othe-r  men  in  moral 
ways ;  but  I  must  say  that  from  the  standpoint  of 
the  evolutionist,  this  can  scarcely  be  hoped  for.  It 
will  cost  even  more  in  the  future  than  in  the  past, 
to  make  a  literary  genius  ;  and  if  he  has  to  strug 
gle  hard  in  order  to  make  a  living,  the  future 
genius  will  not  be  likely  to  follow  a  life  of  duty 


~~  In  His  Lecture  Room          133 

quite  as  strictly  as  other  men.  His  strength  will 
be  always  in  one  direction." 

Is  not  such  language  his  word  of  conviction 
which  is,  at  the  same  time,  a  vindication  of 
himself  ? 

"  Co-operation  is  valuable,"  he  remarks  upon 
the  use  and  the  abuse  of  '  Literary  Societies/ 
"  only  when  it  can  accomplish  what  is  beyond  the 
power  of  the  individual.  When  it  cannot  accom 
plish  this  it  is  more  likely  to  make  mischief  or  to 
act  as  a  check  than  to  do  any  good.  And  one 
reason  for  this  is  very  simple  : — co-operation  is 
unfavorable  to  personal  freedom  of  thought  or 
action.  If  you  work  with  a  crowd,  you  must  try 
to  obey  the  opinion  of  the  majority ;  you  must  act 
in  harmony  with  those  about.  How  very  unfavor 
able  to  literary  originality  such  a  condition  would 
prove,  we  shall  presently  have  reason  to  see." 
And  he  says :  "  Now,  to  sum  up,  I  will  say  that 
literary  societies  of  a  serious  character  such  as 
those  formed  in  universities,  and  sometimes  outside 
of  them,  have  this  value  :  they  will  help  men  to 
rise  up  to  the  general  level.  Now  '  the  general 
level '  means  mediocrity  ;  it  cannot  mean  anything 
else.  But  young  students  of  either  sex,  or  young 
persons  of  sentiment,  must  begin  by  rising  to 


134       Lafcadio  Hearn  in  Japan 

mediocrity, — they  must  grow.  Therefore  I  say 
that  such  societies  give  valuable  encouragement 
to  young  people.  But  though  the  societies  help 
you  to  rise  to  the  general  level,  they  will  never 
help  you  to  rise  above  it.  And  therefore  I  think 
that  man  who  has  reached  his  full  intellectual 
strength  can  derive  no  strength  from  them. 
Literature,  in  the  true  sense,  is  not  what  remains 
at  the  general  level ;  it  is  the  exception,  the 
extraordinary,  the  powerful,  the  unexpected,  that 
soars  far  above  the  general  level.  And  therefore 
I  think  that  a  university  graduate,  intending  to 
make  literature  his  profession,  should  no  more 
hamper  himself  by  belonging  to  literary  societies, 
than  a  man  intending  to  climb  a  mountain  should 
begin  by  tying  a  very  large  stone  to  the  ankle  of 
each  foot.'1  Nothing  is  more  true,  especially  in 
Japan  at  present,  than  such  a  warning. 

And  he  tries  to  explain  the  Western  thought 
toward  woman  in  his  "  Insuperable  Difficulty," 
without  which  thought  no  Japanese  would  find 
it  easy  to  grasp  the  Western  literature.  "  The 
man,"  he  remarks,  "  who  assists  a  woman  in 
danger  is  not  supposed  to  have  any  claim  upon 
her  for  that  reason.  He  has  done  his  duty  only — 
not  for  her,  the  individual,  but  for  womankind  at 


In  His  Lecture  Room          135 

large.  So  that  we  arrive  at  this  general  fact,  that 
the  first  place  in  all  things,  except  rule,  is  given 
to  woman  in  Western  countries,  and  that  it  is 
almost  religiously  given.  Is  woman  a  religion  ? 
Well,  perhaps  you  will  have  the  chance  of  judging 
for  yourselves  if  you  go  to  America."  And  he 
proceeds  :  "  Are  women  individually  considered  as 
gods  ?  Well,  that  depends  how  we  define  the 
word  god.  The  following  definition  would  cover 
the  ground,  I  think  :  '  Gods  are  beings  superior  to 
man,  capable  of  assisting  or  injuring  him,  and  to 
be  placated  by  sacrifice  or  prayer.'  Now  accord 
ing  to  the  definition,  I  think  that  the  attitude  of 
man  toward  woman  in  Western  countries  might 
be  very  well  characterized  as  a  sort  of  worship. 
In  the  upper  classes  of  society,  and  in  the  middle 
classes  also,  great  reverence  toward  woman  is 
exacted.  Men  bow  down  before  them,  make  all 
kinds  of  sacrifices  to  please  them,  beg  for  their 
good  will  and  their  assistance.  It  does  not  matter 
that  this  sacrifice  is  not  in  the  shape  of  incense- 
burning  or  of  temple-offering  ;  nor  does  it  matter 
that  the  prayers  are  different  from  those  pronoun 
ced  in  churches.  And  no  saying  is  more  common, 
no  truth  better  known, — than  that  the  man  who 
hopes  to  succeed  in  life  must  be  able  to  please  the 


136      Lafcadio  Hearn  in  Japan 

woman."  And  he  finishes  up  his  remarks  :  "  But 
it  is  absolutely  necessary  that  you  should  under 
stand  its  (sentiment  of  woman-worship)  relation  to 
language  and  literature.  Therefore  I  have  to  tell 
you  that  you  should  try  to  think  of  it  as  a  kind  of 
religion — a  secular,  social,  artistic  religion — not  to 
be  confounded  with  any  national  religion.  It  is  a 
kind  of  race  feeling,  or  race  creed.  It  has  not 
originated  in  any  sensuous  idea,  but  in  some  very 
ancient  superstitious  idea.  Nearly  all  forms  of  the 
highest  sentiment  and  the  highest  faith  and  the 
highest  art  have  had  their  beginning  in  equally 
humble  soil." 

And  he  tells  in  "  The  Question  of  the  Highest 
Art  "  that  one's  sacrifice  for  woman  is  the  very 
point  of  the  highest  art ;  in  part  he  remarks  : 

"  I  should  say  that  the  highest  form  of  art  must 
necessarily  be  such  art  as  produces  upon  the 
beholder  the  same  moral  effect  that  the  possession 
of  love  produces  in  a  generous  lover.  Such  art 
should  be  a  revelation  of  moral  beauty  for  which  it 
were  worth  while  to  sacrifice  self — the  moral 
ideas  for  which  it  were  beautiful  to  die.  Such  an 
art  ought  to  fill  men  even  with  a  passionate  desire 
to  give  up  life,  pleasure,  everything  for  the  sake 
of  some  grand  and  noble  purpose.  Just  as 


In  His  Lecture  Room          137 

unselfishness  is  the  real  test  of  strong  affection,  so 
unselfishness  ought  to  be  the  real  test  of  the  very 
highest  kind  of  art.  Does  this  art  make  you  feel 
generous,  make  you  willing  to  sacrifice  yourself, 
make  you  eager  to  attempt  some  noble  under 
taking  ?  If  it  does,  then  it  belongs  to  the  higher 
class  of  art, — if  not  to  the  very  highest.  But  if  a 
work  of  art, — whether  sculpture  or  painting  or 
poem  or  drama — does  not  make  us  feel  more  kind 
ly,  more  generous,  morally  better  than  we  were 
before  seeing  it, — then  I  should  say  that,  no  matter 
how  clever,  it  does  not  belong  to  the  highest 

forms  of  art/ 

* 
*  * 

Let  me  copy  out  some  portion  of  the  school 
diary  of  my  friend,  Mr.  Kaworu  Osanai,  to  show 
the  general  agitation  of  the  university  students  at 
the  time  of  Hearn's  dismissal : 

March  2nd  Meiji  37 — To-day  as  yesterday  we 
have  bad  weather. 

I  went  to  school  in  the  afternoon  ;  and  found 
many  students  talking  in  agitated  tones  in  the 
corridor,  and  I  soon  came  to  the  knowledge  that 
Mr.  Hearn  was  going  to  be  dismissed  from  the 
school.  However,  some  one  denied  it  saying  that 


138      Lafcadio  Hearn  in  Japan 

his  term  of  engagement  was  over,  and  he  was 
going  to  resign  of  his  own  accord,  and  he  said 
that  he  was  going  to  America  with  his  eldest  boy. 
My  heart  stirred. 

I  sat  by  the  window  of  the  class-room,  and 
looked  out  when  the  rattling  sound  of  a  jinrikisha 
was  heard,  in  which  I  saw  a  little  man  somewhat 
stooped,  wearing  a  hat  which  you  might  see  in 
one  of  the  pictures  of  the  age  of  Cromwell, — 'that 
high  hat  with  a  large  brim,  such  as  a  Korean 
might  wear.  There  he  was — Mr.  Hearn. 

To-day's  lecture  was  on  Rossetti.  And  he 
paraphrased  "The  Woodspurge,"  and  the  last  part 
was  as  follows  : 

"  In  a  time  of  intense  grief,  it  may  happen  that 
one  learns  nothing,  and  remembers  nothing.  Such 
is  often  the  case.  But  if,  at  such  a  time,  one  does 
happen  to  observe  anything,  it  never  can  be 
forgotten.  And  one  thing  which  I,  that  day, 
learned,  I  never  can  forget.  I  still  remember 
that  the  flower  of  the  woodspurge  is  like  three 
little  cups,  one  inside  of  another." 

Then  he  told  us  one  of  his  boyhood  experiences: 
it  was  that  he  appeared  in  his  school,  when  there 
was  something  sad  in  his  family  ;  but  he  could  not 
keep  his  mind  on  his  lesson  at  all.  He  gazed 


In  His  Lecture  Room          139 

upon  the  ceiling  of  the  room,  one  part  of  which 
was  broken.  "  Even  to  this  day,  I  cannot  forget 
that  ceiling  with  a  big  hole/'  he  said.  We  have 
many  professors  here,  but  not  one  who  interests 
us  as  Mr.  Heam. 

He  walked  round  the  garden  pond  as  usual 
after  one  hour's  lecture  ;  and  I  saw  him  sitting  on 
a  rock  by  the  water,  and  he  began  to  smoke.  He 
loved  solitude  ;  I  wished  I  could  approach  him, 
but  I  looked  upon  him  with  the  utmost  patience 
from  a  distance. 

The  second  hour's  lecture  was  again  Rossetti's 
Staff  and  Scrip.  He  was  always  kind,  and 
interesting,  and  as  usual,  he  smiled  sadly. 

March  5th — We  are  saying  that  we  must  not 
give  up  Mr.  Hearn  ;  we  should  hold  him  with  our 
school  under  any  circumstances. 

This  afternoon's  lecture  was  on  the  birds  in  the 
English  poems  ;  and  he  paraphrased  Meredith's 
Skylark  so  beautifully  as  is  only  possible  to  him. 

He  has  so  many  friends  in  the  world.  He 
might  say  :  "  What,  then  ?"  (Supposing  he  were 
dismissed  from  the  school.)  I  will  not  feel  happy, 
I  am  sure,  to  appear  after  he  leaves. 


140      Lafcadio  Hearn  in  Japan 

March  xoth — To-day  Mr.  Hearn's  lecture  was 
on  Shakespeare  ;  and  he  began  thus  : 

"  Without  any  long  preparation,  sudden,  un 
expected,  the  enormous  figure  of  Shakespeare 
suddenly  appears  in  literature  at  the  beginning  of 
the  i /th  century.  Nothing  before  him  intellectu 
ally  approached  his  work.  .  .  . 

The  voice  of  the  old  professor  with  one  eye, 
and  white  hair,  was  lovely  as  his  words. 

The  evening  of  a  "  little  spring  "  day  was  seen 
in  the  western  sky  ;  the  bell  rang,  and  Mr.  Hearn 
returned  home. 

The  students  of  the  third-year  class  wished  us 
to  stay  as  they  had  something  to  discuss.  (By 
the  way,  I  was  in  the  first-year  class  only.) 

It  was  that  they  told  us  of  Mr.  Hearn's 
resignation,  or  more  likely,  dismissal,  from  the 
school  as  it  had  become  already  public.  And  they 
said  that  they  were  dissatisfied  with  the  action  of 
the  university,  and  we  should  meet  together  to 
discuss  that  important  question  at  a  certain  hall  at 
Dai  Machi  to-night. 

I  went  to  the  hall  with  beating  heart.  Every 
chair  of  the  hall  was  already  occupied  by  the 
students  of  the  literature  department,  when  I 


In  His  Lecture  Room          141 

entered.  The  speaker  took  his  chair  with  a  little 
cough,  and  called  Mr.  Kimura,  who  wished  to 
speak  first. 

"  There  is  a  girl  who  has  been  kept  closely  in 
her  family,  and  when  she  is  once  brought  out, 
she  will  go  straight  to  pick  one  lover  from  among 
the  thousand  people  ;  and  so  it  is  with  the  students 
who  enter  a  new  school.  We  will  choose  one 
beloved  teacher  from  the  hundred  others.  .  .  " 

"  No  !     No  !  " 

"  .  .  .  It  was  always  so.  There  was  a  lady 
teacher  at  my  grammar  school.  ..." 

"  Cut  it,  cut  it !  " 

The  speaker  spoke  out : 

"  Mr.  Kimura,  you  are  understood ;  you  mean 
Mr.  Hearn  in  your  university." 

"  Yes,  Oh,  yes  !  " 

"Next?     Mr.  Tasawa." 

"  The  existence  of  the  Imperial  University  of 
Tokyo  is  only  known  to  foreign  countries  on 
account  of  Lafcadio  Hearn,  the  writer.  What 
has  the  university  to  be  proud  of,  if  he  goes  ? 
The  university  is  nothing ;  I  am  a  lover  of  the 
school ;  I  think  we  must  let  him  stay  with  our 
school." 

"  Yes,  yes,  we  must  have  even  the  determina- 


142      Lafcadio  Hearn  in  Japan 

tion  of  those  forty-seven  Ronin"  many  students 
exclaimed. 

"I     .     .     "  somebody  cried  in  a  strange  voice. 

"  Next,  Mr.  Mizuno,"  the  speaker  pointed. 

"  There  is  one  Japanese  popular  song  :  '  We 
don't  mind  even  carrying  a  pot  for  love's  sake.' 
I  will  do  anything  for  Mr.  Hearn.  .  .  ." 

"  You  don't  mind  about  your  own  life  ?  "  many 
students  exclaimed  loudly. 

"  No  !  " 

"Well,  gentlemen!"  there  was  a  solemn 
voice. 

"  Now,  Mr.  Shibata,"  the  speaker  said. 

"  It  seems  to  me  that  you  are  all  driven  by 
your  young  men's  passion.  Pray,  compose  your 
self  !  You  say  '  It  is  for  love's  sake,'  and  '  You 
don't  mind  about  your  own  life  ' ;  indeed,  such 
language  sounds  quite  romantic.  Mr.  Hearn  is 
one  of  the  best  teachers,  not  to  speak  of  him  as  a 
writer.  But  it  would  seem  far  from  necessary  that 
we  sacrifice  our  future  by  attempting  to  keep  him 
with  us." 

"  Oh,  you  traitor  !     Stop  !  " 

"  Get  out  of  here,  and  join  the  socialists  !"  We 
all  exclaimed. 

"  You  are  too  young,  you  are  fired  unnecessari- 


In  His  Lecture  Room          143 

ly  with  passion  and  spirit,"  Mizuno  began  to 
speak  again. 

"  Why,  we  did  not  know  you  were  married/' 
some  one  tried  to  sneer  at  him. 

"  Keep  quiet,  gentlemen  !  We  are  discussing 
a  most  serious  matter,"  the  speaker  said. 

"  It  would  be  better  that  we  should  appear 
before  the  director  of  the  department  first,  and  if 
we  cannot  help  it,  we  will  welcome  a  new  teacher, 
whoever  he  may  be,"  Mizuno  said. 

"  Who  in  Japan  is  able  to  teach  literature  as 
Mr.  Hearn,  I  should  like  to  know,"  someone 
spoke  aloud. 

"  How  do  you  know  there  is  not  ?" 

"  Do  you  know  any  ?"  the  same  voice 
spoke. 

*'  Keep  quiet !  Speak,  Mr.  Yasunaka  !  "  the 
speaker  said. 

"  I  think  that  a  fellow  like  Mr.  Mizuno  has  no 
right  to  take  the  chair  of  this  meeting.  We 
came  here  with  the  determination  that  we  would 
do  anything  to  keep  Mr.  Hearn  with  us." 

"  What  should  you  do  if  you  were  dismissed 
from  the  school  ?  "  again  Mizuno  spoke. 

"  I  don't  care.     .     .     ." 

The  speaker  closed  the  discussion  ;  he  wished 


144       Lafcadio  Hearn  in  Japan 

them  to  raise  the  hands  for  nay,  and  he  counted 
only  one, — two, — three, — four. 

"  Banzai !  "  all  the  students   shouted. 

"  Gentlemen,  be  seated ;  we  have  a  more 
important  thing  to  discuss  ;  that  is  to  say,  what 
method  we  must  take." 

After  all,  it  was  decided  that  we  should  send 
a  representative  to  call  on  the  director  and  also 
one  to  Mr.  Hearn,  and  at  first  put  the  matter 
gently.  And  then,  we  should  have  another  meet 
ing  if  necessary. 

March  i$th — I  am  told  that  the  director  was 
moved  by  our  enthusiasm. 

March  i6th — Again,  I  am  told  that  Mr.  Hearn 
said,  when  the  representative  saw  him,  that  he 
would  never  forget  our  sympathy  ;  and  it  is  said 
he  even  cried. 

March  i/th — There  was  some  talk  that  the 
director  and  Mr.  Hearn  met  together  and  talked. 

April  icth — The  spring  vacation  is  over.  I 
appeared  in  the  school  expecting  to  see  Mr.  Hearn 
on  the  platform  again. 


In  His  Lecture  Room          145 

Alas !  Mr.  .  .  .  was  newly  appointed  to 
be  a  lecturer  on  English  literature. 

What  became  of  the  meeting  of  the  director 
and  Mr.  Hearn  ?  Is  it  the  only  thing  that  our 
demonstration  brought  ? 

April  2Oth — I  did  not  feel  like  appearing  in 
school  to-day;  I  was  reading  Turgeneff ;  he  wrote  : 

"Two — three — years  passed — six  years — Life 
has  been  passing,  ebbing  away  .  .  .  while  I 
merely  watched  how  it  was  ebbing.  As  in  child 
hood,  on  some  river's  edge  one  makes  a  little 
pond  and  dams  it  up,  and  tries  in  all  sorts  of 
ways  to  keep  the  water  from  soaking  through 
from  breaking  in.  But  at  last  the  water  breaks 
in,  and  then  you  abandon  all  your  vain  efforts, 
and  you  are  glad  instead  to  watch  all  that  you 
had  guarded  ebbing  away  to  the  last  drop  .  ." 

And  I  thought  about  Mr.  Hearn. 


APPENDIX 


I 


ON  ROMANTIC  AND  CLASSIC 

LITERATURE,  IN  RELATION 

TO  STYLE* 

IN  the  course  of  these  lectures  you  will  find 
me  often  using  such  words  as  "  romantic  "  and 
"  classic  " — either  in  relation  to  poetry  or  to 
prose, — to  expression  or  to  sentiment.  And  it  is 
rather  important  that  you  should  be  able  to  keep 
in  mind  the  general  idea  of  the  difference  of  the 
qualities  implied  by  these  adjectives.  What  is  a 
romantic  composition  ? — what  is  a  classic  or 
classical  composition  ? 

Detailed  explanations  of  these  terms  I  have 
already  given  in  the  course  of  other  lectures,  and 
details  will  not  be  necessary  at  present.  It  will 
be  sufficient,  quite  sufficient,  t>  remember  that 
classical  work,  as  regards  any  modern  production, 
means  a  work  const  ucted  according  to  old 

*  This  lecture  and  the  following  "  Farewell  Address " 
which  might  be  said  to  be  a  companion  lecture  are  copied  out 
from  Mr.  Uchigasaki's  note-book;  they  are  fair  specimens  of 
the  lectures  Mr.  Hearn  delivered  in  the  Imperial  University. 
His  clearness  in  language  and  soundness  in  opinion  were  well 
admired  by  his  students;  he  always  remembered  that  he 
was  addressing  students  to  whom  English  was  an  alien 
language  and  study. 


150       Lafcadio  Hearn  in  Japan 

rules  which  have  been  learned  from  the  classic 
authors  of  antiquity,  the  Greek  and  Latin 
masters  of  literature.  So  that  the  very  shortest 
possible  definition  of  classical  composition  would  be 
this  : — any  prose  or  poetry  written  according  to 
ancient  rules,  that  is  ancient  rhetoric.  And, 
conversely,  you  might  suppose  romantic  to  mean 
any  compositions  not  according  to  rhetoric,  not 
according  to  the  old  rules.  But  this  would  be  but 
partly  true.  What  is  done  without  regard  to  rules 
of  any  kind  could  scarcely  be  good  literature ;  and 
European  romantic  literature  really  includes  the 
best  of  almost  everything  in  drama,  in  poetry,  in 
fiction,  and  even  in  the  essay.  There  have  been 
rules  observed,  of  course ;  when  I  tell  you  that 
Tennyson  was  a  romanticist  quite  as  much  as 
Shakespeare  was,  you  will  see  that  absence  of  law 
does  not  signify  romanticism. 

To  define  exactly  what  is  romantic  in  literature 
would  require  a  very  exact  understanding  of  what 
was  up  to  our  own  time  considered  classic  in 
English  literature ; — for  romantic  work  has  always 
been  neither  more  nor  less  than  a  justifiable 
departure  from  the  observance  of  accepted  lit 
erary  conventions,  and  to  explain  these  conven 
tions  fully,  you  would  find  a  very  tiresome  under 
taking — involving  much  lecturing  about  rhetorical 
forms  and  their  origins.  A  better  way  to  clear 
the  thing  will  be  to  define  the  romantic  position 
thus  : — 

It  is  right  and  artistic  to  choose  whatever  form 
of  literary  expresssion  an  author  may  prefer, 


Appendix  151 


— providing  only  that  the  form  be  beautiful  and 
correct. 

The  classical  position  represented  extreme  con 
servatism  in  literature,  and  might  be  thus  put  into 
a  few  words  : — "  You  have  no  right  whatever  to 
choose  your  own  forms  of  literary  expression, 
either  in  poetry  or  in  prose.  Experience  has 
proved  that  the  forms  which  we  prescribe  are  the 
best ;  and  whatever  you  have  to  say  must  be  said 
according  to  our  rule.  If  you  do  not  obey  those 
rules,  you  will  be  inflicting  an  injury  upon  your 
native  language  and  your  native  literature ;  and 
for  such  an  injury  you  can  not  be  forgiven." 

The  great  mistake  which  the  champions  of 
classical  feeling  made  in  England,  and  indeed 
throughout  modern  Europe,  was  the  mistake  con 
sidering  language  as  something  fixed,  perfected, 
completely  evolved.  If  any  modern  European 
language  were  rearly  perfect  —  or  even  so  nearly 
perfect  as  the  old  Greek  language  had  been — then 
indeed  there  might  be  some  reason  for  the 
conservative  mood.  After  a  language  has  reached 
its  ripest  period,  then  it  is  threatened  with  decay 
from  exterior  sources  ;  and  at  such  a  time  measures 
may  be  taken  with  good  reason  to  check  such 
decay.  But  all  European  languages  are  still  in 
the  process  of  growth,  of  development,  of  evolu 
tion.  To  check  that  growth  would  have  been  the 
inevitable  result  of  a  triumph  of  classicism.  You 
must  imagine  the  classicists  as  saying  to  the 
romanticists :  "  Do  not  try  to  do  anything 
new,  because  you  can  not  do  anything  better  than 


152      Lafcadio  Hearn  in  Japan 

what  has  already  been  done."  And  the  romanti 
cists  answer  :  "  What  you  want  is  to  stop  all  prog 
ress  :  I  know  that  I  can  do  better,  and  I  am  going 
to  do  it,  in  my  own  way."  Of  course  the  same 
literary  division  is  to  be  found  in  every  country 
having  a  literature,  whether  of  Europe  or  of  the 
East.  There  will  always  be  the  conservative 
party,  anxious  to  preserve  the,  tradition  of  the  past, 
and  dreading  every  change  that  can  affect  those 
traditions — because  it  loves  them,  recognizes  their 
beauty,  and  can  not  believe  that  anything  new 
could  ever  be  quite  so  beautiful  and  useful.  And 
everywhere  there  must  be  the  romantic  element, 
young,  energetic,  impatient  of  restraint,  and  all 
confident  of  being  able  to  do  something  much 
better  than  ever  was  done  before.  Strange  as  it 
may  seem,  it  is  only  out  of  the  quarrelling  between 
these  conflicting  parties  that  any  literary  progress 
can  grow. 

Before  going  further,  permit  me  to  say  so  mething 
in  opposition  to  a  very  famous  and  every  popular 
Latin  proverb, — In  media  tutissimis  ibus, — "  Thou 
wilt  go  most  safely  by  taking  the  middle  course." 
In  speaking  of  two  distinct  tendencies  in  literature, 
you  might  expect  me  to  say  that  the  aim  of  the 
student  should  be  to  avoid  extremes,  and  to  try 
not  to  be  either  too  conservative  or  too  liberal. 
But  I  should  certainly  never  give  any  such  advice. 
On  the  contrary,  I  think  that  the  proverb  above 
quoted  is  one  of  the  most  mischievous,  one  of  the 
most  pernicious,  one  of  the  most  foolish  that  ever 
was  invented  in  this  world.  I  believe  very 


Appendix  153 


strongly  in  extremes, — in  violent  extremes  ;  and 
I  am  quite  sure  that  all  progress  in  this  world, 
whether  literary  or  scientific,  or  religious,  or 
political,  or  social,  has  been  obtained  only  with 
the  assistance  of  extremes.  But  remember  that  I 
say,  "  with  the  assistance  " — I  do  not  mean  that 
extremes  alone  accomplish  the  aim :  there 
must  be  antagonism,  but  there  must  also 
be  conservatism.  What  I  mean  by  finding 
fault  with  the  proverb  is  simply  this, — that  it  is 
very  bad  advice  for  a  young  man.  To  give  a 
young  man  such  advice  is  very  much  like  telling 
him  not  to  do  his  best,  but  only  to  do  half  of  his 
best, — or,  in  other  words,  to  be  half-hearted  in  his 
undertaking.  An  old  man  with  experience  cer 
tainly  learns  how  to  take  a  middle  course,  and 
how  to  do  so  through  conviction  and  knowledge, 
not  through  prudence  or  thro  ugh  caution.  But  this  is 
practically  impossible  for  the  average  young  man 
to  do  with  sincerity  to  himself.  He  can  not  have 
acquired  in — let  us  say  25  years, — the  experience 
of  5°  years;  and  without  such  experience  you 
can  not  expect  him  to  have  no  strong  prejudices, 
no  great  loves  and  hates,  no  admirations,  no 
repulsion.  The  old  man  can  master  all  this, 
because  he  has  had  the  practical  opportunity  of 
studying  most  questions  from  a  hundred  different 
sides  and  also  because  he  has  learned  patience 
in  a  degree  impossible  to  youth.  And  it  is  not 
the  old  men  who  ever  prove  great  reformers  : 
they  are  too  cautious,  too  wise.  Reforms 
are  made  by  the  vigor  and  courage  and 


154      Lafcadio  Hearn  in  Japan 

the  self-sacrifice  and  the  emotional  conviction 
of  young  men,  who  do  not  know  enough  to  be 
afraid,  and  who  feel  much  more  deeply  than  they 
think.  Indeed  great  reforms  are  not  accomplished 
by  reasoning,  but  by  feeling.  And  therefore  I 
should  say  that  nothing  ought  to  be  more  an 
object  with  young  scholars  than  the  cultivation  of 
their  best  feelings.  For  feelings  are  even  more 
important  in  his  future  career  than  cold  reasoning. 
It  is  rather  a  good  sign  for  the  young  man  to  be 
a  little  imprudent,  a  little  violent  in  his  way  of 
thinking  and  speaking  about  those  subjects  in 
which  he  is  most  profoundly  interested  ;  and  I 
should  say  that  a  young  man  who  has  no  strong 
opinion,  is  not  a  really  vigorous  person  either 
in  mind  or  body.  Too  much  of  the  middle 
course  is  a  bad  sign.  And  now  let  us  apply 
the  principle  indicated  to  literature.  Literature 
is  a  subject  upon  which  a  young  man  of  educa 
tion  should  be  able  to  feel  very  strongly.  Ought 
he  to  be  a  conservative,  a  classicist  ? — Ought  he 
to  be  a  liberal,  a  romanticist  ?  I  should  answer 
that  it  does  not  matter  at  all  which  he  may 
happen  to  be ;  but  he  certainly  ought  to  put 
himself  upon  one  side  or  upon  the  other,  and 
not  try  to  do  anything -so  half-hearted  as  to  take  a 
middle  course.  No  middle  course  policy  ever  ac 
complished  anything  for  literature,  and  never  will 
accomplish  anything.  But  conservation  has  do  .e 
very  much ;  and  liberalism  has  done  still  more ; 
and  they  have  done  it  by  their  continual  con 
test  for  supremacy.  In  the  end  this  contest 


Appendix  155 


it  is  which  makes  the  true  and  valuable  mid 
dle  course  ;  but  no  middle  course — I  mean 
no  system  ever  combining  the  best  qualities  of 
the  two  schools — could  have  been  born  out  of 
a  middle  course  policy,  which  simply  means  a 
state  of  comparative  inaction.  As  for  the  question, 
"  Ought  I  to  be  a  romanticist  or  a  conservative  ?  " 
• — that  can  be  answered  best  by  one's  own  heart. 
How  do  you  feel  upon  the  matter  ?  If  you  have 
a  sincere  admiration  for  the  romantic  side  of 
literature,  and  sincere  faith  in  its  principle, — then  it 
is  your  duty  to  be  a  romanticist.  If  on  the  other 
hand  you  can  feel  more  strongly  the  severe  beauty 
of  classic  methods  and  perceive  the  advantage  to 
national  literature  of  classic  rules, — then  it  is  your 
duty  to  be  a  classicist  if  you  can.  In  the  course  of 
time  you  will  find  that  larger  experience  will  make 
you  much  more  tolerant  in  either  direction,  but,  at 
the  outset,  it  is  much  better  to  join  one  of  the 
two  camps.  And  you  can  do  so  with  the  full 
conviction  that  you  will  serve  in  literature  which 
ever  side  you  sincerely  espouse. 

You  know  that  in  a  steam  engine  there  is  a  part 
of  the  machinery  expressing  the  design  to  check 
speed, — to  prevent  the  structure  from  operating 
too  rapidly.  Without  this 'governing  apparatus,  a 
steam  engine"'  would  quickly  break  into  pieces. 
Now  conservatism,  classicism  has  acted  exactly 
in  the  way  suggested.  It  has  prevented  changes 
from  being  too  quickly  made  :  it  has  prevented 
the  machinery  of  literature  from  breaking  to 
pieces.  On  the  other  hand,  by  itself  it  could 


156       Lafcadio  Hearn  in  Japan     £ 

accomplish  very  little  good.  As  I  said  before  a 
long  period  of  classic  domination  would  be 
literary  stagnation.  This  is  the  history  of 
conservatism  in  every  European  literature, 
whenever  it  became  supremely  powerful  literature 
began  to  decay,  or  to  grow  barren.  But  on  the 
other  hand  the  romantic  tendency,  unchecked, 
also  leads  to  literary  decadence.  At  first  the 
romantic  principle  of  liberty  is  exercised  only 
within  comparatively  narrow  limits.  Presently 
however,  the  more  impatient  and  unsubmissive 
party  in  the  liberal  camp  desires  even  to  break 
down  the  rules  which  they  once  thought  to 
maintain.  Still  later  a  violation  of  all  rules  is 
likely  to  become  a  temporary  fashion.  Eventually 
the  nation,  the  public,  become  disgusted  with  the 
result,  and  a  strong  reaction  sets  in,  with  the 
result  of  putting  the  classic  party  into  supreme 
power  again.  This  tendency  is  very  well 
exemplified  by  the  present  history  of  literature  in 
France, — where  a  reaction  has  been  provoked  by 
the  excesses  of  literary  liberalism.  In  England 
also  there  are  signs  that  a  classic  reaction  is 
coming.  Prose  has  decayed ;  poetry  is  almost 
silent ; — when  we  find  a  decay  of  prose  and 
comparative  silence  of  poetry,  past  experience 
assures  us  that  a  classical  reaction  is  likely.  But 
when  classicism  returns  after  a  long  period  of 
romantic  triumph,  it  never  returns  in  exactly  the 
same  form. 

After  reinstatement,  the  classical  spirit  invariably 
proves  to  have  gained  a  great  deal  by  its  last  defeat. 


Appendix  157 


It  returns  as  a  generous  conqueror — more  liberal, 
more  enterprising,  more  sympathetic  than  before. 
Again  it  exercises  restraint  upon  choice  of  forms 
and  modes  of  sentiment,  but  not  the  same  restraint 
as  formerly.  So,  too,  we  find  romanticism  gaining 
strength  by  each  defeat.  When  it  obtained  control 
again,  after  an  interval  of  classic  rule,  it  proves 
itself  to  have  learned  not  a  little  from  its  previous 
mistakes  :  it  is  apt  to  be  less  extravagant,  less 
aggressive,  less  indifferent  to  race-experience  than 
before.  In  other  words,  every  alternation  of  the 
literary  battle  seems  to  result  in  making  the 
romantic  spirit  more  classic,  and  the  classic  spirit 
more  romantic.  Each  learns  from  the  other  by 
opposing  it.  You  know  that  all  progressive 
motion  is  rhythmical  :  we  do  not  advance  to  our 
aims  in  a  straight  line  under  any  circumstances  ; 
all  advance  is  through  a  series  of  undulations, 
representing  action  and  reaction,  alternating  with 
each  other.  The  whole  history  of  progress  in 
modern  European  literature — whether  that  litera 
ture  be  English,  Italian,  French,  or  German — might 
be  represented  by  the  following  diagram  :  — 


The  C  line  represents  the  classical  undulatory 
movement;  the  line  marked  "  R "  represents 
the  romantic  tendency.  These  two  sets  of 
undulations  so  closely  follow  each  other  that 
the  romantic  and  the  classic  tendencies  regularly 


158      Lafcadio  Hearn  in  Japan 

alternate  in  their  periods  of  domination.  But  you 
will  see  that  there  is  more  than  a  simple  motion 
of  advance  indicated  by  the  passage  of  the  lines 
from  left  to  right  As  they  pass  toward  the  right 
each  series  of  the  undulations  becomes  a  little 
larger.  You  can  take  this  argumentation  to 
signify  essential  progress— essential  progress 
always  signifying  the  increase  of  powers. 

What  I  have  thus  far  said  relates  especially  to 
European  literature ;  and  I  am  much  too  ignorant 
ot  Japanese  literature  to  speak  to  you  about  it 
with  any  attempt  at  details.  But  I  may  venture 
some  general  remarks,  justified  by  such  inferences 
as  may  be  drawn  from  the  past  history  of  litera 
ture  in  other  countries.  Whether  there  has  been 
a  true  romantic  movement  in  Japanese  literature, 
I  do  not  even  know ;  but  I  am  quite  sure  that 
such  a  movement  must  be  cultivated  sooner  or 
later  in  the  future,  and  that  not  once  only,  but 
many  times.  I  imagine  that  this  movement 
would  especially  take  the  form  of  a  revolt  against 
the  obligation  of  writing  in  the  "  written 
language  "  only,  and  perhaps  also  against  fixed 
forms  and  rules  of  poetic  composition.  I 
am  quite  sure  that  a  revolt  of  some  kind  must 
happen — that  is,  in  the  event  of  any  great  literary 
progress.  And,  it  is  proper  here  that  I  should 
state  how  my  own  sympathies  lie  in  regard  to 
European  literature ; — they  are  altogether  ro 
mantic,  the  classical  tendencies  I  think  of  as 
painfully  necessary ;  but  I  have  never  been  able 
to  feel  any  sympathy  whatever  with  modern 


Appendix 


classic  literature  in  the  strict  sense  of  the  word. 
Consequently,  as  regards  any  new  departure  in 
future  Japanese  literature,  I  should  naturally  hope 
for  a  romantic  triumph.  I  should  like  to  hear  of 
the  breaking  down  of  many  old  rules,  and  the 
establishment  of  many  new  ones  I  should  like 
to  hear  of  some  great  scholar  not  afraid  to  write  a 
great  book  in  the  language  of  the  common 
people ;  and  I  should  like  to  see  or  hear  of 
attempts  in  the  direction  of  the  true  epic  and  of 
the  great  romance  in  some  new  form  of  Japanese 
poetry.  But  having  said  this  much,  I  only  mean 
to  express  my  frank  sympathies.  As  to  question 
whether  one  should  attempt,  or  should  not 
attempt  a  new  departure  in  Japanese  literature, 
there  is  very  much  more  to  be  said.  Before  any 
body  attempts  to  make  a  great  change,  it  were 
well  that  he  should  be  able  to  correctly  estimate 
his  own  strength. 

Suppose  that  we  take,  for  example,  the  subject 
of  writing  in  the  colloquial  language — let  us  say 
a  great  novel,  a  great  drama,  or  a  great  work  of 
any  didactic  description.  It  seems  to  me  that  a 
first  question  to  ask  oneself,  as  to  the  advisability 
of  using  the  popular  instead  of  the  literary 
languages  should  be  this  : — "  Am  I  able,  by  using 
the  colloquial,  to  obtain  much  greater  and  better 
effects  than  I  can  obtain  by  following  the  usual 
method  ?  "  If  any  young  author,  who  has  had  a 
university  training,  can  ask  himself  that  question, 
and  honestly  answer  it  in  the  affirmative,  then  I 
should  think  that  it  would  be  his  duty  to  throw 


160      Lafcadio  Hearn  in  Japan 

aside  the  old  forms  and  attempt  to  do  something 
quite  new.  But  unless  a  man  is  certain  of  being 
able  to  accomplish  more  in  this  way  than  he 
could  accomplish  in  any  other  way,  I  should  not 
encourage  him  to  work  in  a  new  direction.  The 
only  reason  for  making  great  changes  in  any  art 
is  the  certainty  of  improvement, — the  conviction 
of  new  forces  to  be  gained.  To  attempt  some 
thing  new  only  with  the  result  of  producing  inferior 
work  were  a  very  serious  mistake,  because  such  a 
mistake  would  react  against  the  whole  liberal 
movement,  the  whole  tendency  to  healthy  change. 
But,  if  you  have  at  any  time  a  strong  conviction 
that  by  breaking  old  roots  you  can  effect  new 
things  of  great  worth,  then  it  would  be  your  duty, 
without  fearing  any  consequences  to  break  the 
rules. 

In  Europe  every  romantic  triumph  has  been 
achieved  only  at  a  very  considerable  cost.  Liter 
ature,  like  religion,  like  patriotism,  must  have  its 
martyrs,  men  must  be  ready  to  sacrifice  their 
personal  interests  in  order  to  bring  about  any 
great  changes  for  the  better.  Immense  forces 
have  always  been  marshalled  on  the  classic  side 
in  modern  Europe.  For  example,  the  university, 
— which  represents  a  tremendous  power  ;  secondly 
the  religious  element ;  for  religion  has  always 
been  necessarily  conservative  in  Europe  ;  and  on 
the  subject  of  literature,  this  conservatism  has  not 
been  without  good  cause.  ^  And  thirdly,  I  may 
remark  that  the  highest  classes — the  nobility,  the 
aristocracy,  even  the  upper  middle  classes,  have 


Appendix  161 


generally  given  all  their  support  to  literary  con 
servatism,  as  well  as  to  other  kinds  of  con 
servatism.  And  you  can  scarcely  imagine  what 
power,  in  a  country  like  England,  was  formerly 
represented  by  Universities,  the  Church,  and 
society.  $It  really  required  extraordinary  courage 
to  oppose  the  judgement  of  these,  even  in  so 
small  a  matter  as  literary  style.  I  do  not  know 
whether  in  this  country  a  literary  innovator  would 
have  any  corresponding  opposition  ;  but  I  am  led 
to  suppose  that  there  is  a  very  considerable 
strength  of  conservatism  still  ruling  certain  de 
partments  of  Japanese  literature,  because  I  have 
been  told,  when  urging  that  certain  things  might 
be  done  with  good  results,  that  these  things  were 
contrary  to  custom.  That  fact  in  itself  would  not 
be,  I  think,  a  sufficient  reason  for  attempting  noth 
ing  new.  The  super- excellent,  the  rare,  the  best  of 
any  thing  is  nearly  always  in  some  sort  contrary 
to  custom.  But  it  is  true  that  only  the  men  of 
hopes,  the  giants  should  break  the  custom.  And 
that  is  why  I  believe  that  a  conservatism  like  that 
of  England  has  been  of  very  great  value  to  litera 
ture  in  the  past.  The  opposition  which  it  offered 
to  change  was  so  great  that  only  the  most  extra 
ordinary  men  could  bear  to  break  through.  When 
a  person  is  sure  of  being  able  to  do  something 
superior  to  classical  work  by  attempting  romantic 
work  he  is  certainly  justified  in  trying  ; — because, 
to  do  better  than  has  already  been  done  means 
to  add  something  of  great  value  to  the  sum  of 
human  experience.  The  doing  of  that  will 


162       Lafcadio  Hearn  in  Japan 

always  justify  the  breaking  of  rules.  But  the 
breaker  must  be  a  strong  man.  It  is  not  an 
excuse  to  break  a  rule,  that  the  rule  is  difficult  to 
follow  or  tiresome  to  obey.  As  I  have  already 
said,  it  seems  to  me  that  a  young  man's  convic 
tion  ought  to  make  him  either  a  conservative  or  a 
liberal  in  literature, — that  he  ought  to  be  natually 
either  a  classicist  or  a  romanticist.  But  in  declar 
ing  this  I  did  not  mean  that  any  one  would  be 
justified  in  following  his  literary  tendency  to  the 
extent  of  breaking  rules  merely  for  the  production 
of  inferior  work.  One  may  be  a  romanticist,  for 
example,  by  taste,  by  sympathy,  by  feeling, 
without  producing  anything  of  which  the  evident 
weakness  would  displease  the  school  which  he 
represents.  And  now,  I  want  to  say  something 
about  Western  styles,  as  represented  by  romantic 
and  classic  writers.  According  to  the  rules  of 
classic  rhetoric,  the  style  of  the  cultivated  ought 
to  be  more  or  less  uniform.  Rules  having  been 
established  for  construction  and  proportion  and 
position  of  every  part  of  a  sentence,  as  well 
as  of  every  part  of  verse,  one  would  pre 
sume  that  all  who  perfectly  master  and 
obey  those  rules  would  write  in  exactly 
the  same  way,  so  that  you  could  not  tell  the 
style  of  one  man  from  the  style  of  another.  If 
all  men's  minds  were  exactly  alike,  and  all  had 
studied  classic  rules,  this  would  really  have  been 
the  case  throughout  Europe  at  different  periods 
of  literary  history.  In  the  English  classic  age — -I 
might  say  during  a  greater  part  of  the  i8th 


Appendix  163 


century,  such  uniformity  did  actually  obtain,  that 
we  find  it  hard  to  distinguish  the  work  of  one 
from  another,  if  we  do  not  know  the  name  of  the 
author  or  the  name  of  the  book.  Thousands  and 
thousands  of  pages  of  prose  were  then  produced 
by  different  men, — each  page  as  much  resem 
bling  every  other  as  one  egg  or  one  pea  might 
resemble  all  other  eggs  or  other  peas.  It  was 
so  in  prose ;  it  was  also  in  poetry.  Among 
the  scores  of  poets  who  used  in  that  time 
the  heroic  couplet — that  is  the  rhymed  ten- 
syllable  lines  that  Pope  made  fashionable — it 
requires  a  very  clever  critic  to  distinguish  the 
work  of  one  man  from  the  work  of  another  merely 
by  studying  the  text  itself.  I  think  that  in  France 
the  results  of  classical  uniformity  became  even 
more  marked.  Without  a  good  deal  of  prelimi 
nary  study  you  would  find  the  work  of  the  French 
classic  poets  very  much  alike  in  the  matter  of 
Alexandrines,—  a  verse  quite  as  tiresome  and  as 
artificial  as  the  heroic  couplets  of  Pope.  But  the 
French  prose  of  the  classic  age  is  much  more 
uniform  than  English  prose  ever  could  be,  for  the 
English  language  is  less  perfect,  and  therefore 
less  subject  to  the  discipline  of  fixed  rules.  But 
you  might  take  half  a  dozen  pages  of  French 
prose  written  by  each  of  50  different  French 
authors,  and  you  would  find  it  very  hard  to  dis 
tinguish  one  style  from  another.  I  do  not  mean 
to  say  that  the  style  does  not  exist  in  the  person 
al  sense.  It  does  exist ;  but  the  differences  are 
so  fine,  so  delicate,  that  to  the  common  reader 


164       Lafcadio  Hearn  in  Japan 

there  is  no  difference  at  all.  And  by  the  rules 
of  classic  prose,  individualism  ought  not  show 
itself  to  any  great  degree  in  an  author.  •'"* 

However,  even  under  the  severest  descipline  of 
classic  rules  what  we  call  style  can  always  be 
detected  by  a  trained  critic.  This  is  simply 
because  there  is  something  in  the  mind  of  each 
man  so  very  different  from  that  which  is  in  the 
mind  of  every  other  man,  that  no  two  men  could 
ever  obey  the  same  rule  in  exactly  the  same  way. 
The  judgement  of  each,  the  feeling  of  each, 
would  move  in  a  slightly  different  direction  from 
the  judgement  of  the  other.  In  the  classic  sense, 
strictly  speaking,  style  had  the  only  meaning  of 
obedience  to  the  general  rules,  correctness,  ex 
actitude.  But  in  the  romantic  sense,  this  had 
nothing  at  all  to  do  with  style.  To  the  romantic 
comprehension  of  style  as  we  understand  the  term 
to-day,  it  was  the  particular  difference  by  which 
the  writings  of  one  man  could  be  distinguished 
from  the  writings  of  another,  that  really  signified 
the  style.  And,  in  our  own  day,  literary  style 
means  personal  character— means  the  individual 
quality  of  feeling  which  distinguishes  every  au 
thor's  work.  The  romantic  tendency  is  to  accent 
uate  and  expand  such  differences,  such  individual 
charactaristics  ; — the  tendency  of  classic  discipline 
is  to  suppress  them, — at  least  to  suppress  them  as 
much  as  possible.  From  this  fact  I  think  you 
will  perceive  one  signification  of  romanticism, — 
one  character  of  it  which  should  command  our 
utmost  respect.  Romanticism  aims  to  develop 


Appendix  165 


personality ;  consciously  or  unconsciously  the 
object  of  every  school  of  romanticism  has  been  to 
develop  the  individuals,  rather  than  to  develop 
any  general  power  of  literary  expression.  Con 
servatism  represses  the  individual  as  much  as 
possible  ;  and  all  classic  schools  in  Europe  have 
endeavored  to  cultivate  or  maintain  a  general 
type  of  literary  excellence  at  the  expense  of  the 
individual.  And  thus  the  necessary  interdepen 
dence  of  the  two  different  literary  systems  must 
become  manifest  to  you. 

So  the  question  resolves  itself  into  the  question 
of  personality  in  literature.  What  is  personality  ? 
It  is  that  particular  quality  of  character  which 
makes  each  man  or  woman  in  this  world  different 
from  all  other  men  or  women  in  the  world.  Indi 
viduality  only  means  separateness  ; — personality 
means  very  much  more, — all  the  distinction  in 
human  nature  of  an  emotional  or  an  intellectual 
kind  belong  to  personality.  In  the  lowest  ranks 
of  life  you  find  that  the  people  are  very  much 
alike  in  their  habits,  thoughts,  and  emotion. 
Really  there  are  personal  differences ;  but  they 
are  not  very  strong.  We  say  of  these  classes 
that  personality  has  not  much  developed  among 
them.  Higher  up  the  differences  become  much 
more  definite  and  visible.  And  in  the  intellectual 
class  personality  devel opes  to  such  a  degree  that 
uniformity  of  opinion  is  out  of  the  question  :  here 
each  man  thinks  and  feels  differently  from  most 
of  the  rest.  They  can  go  still  higher.  In  such 
classes  of  select  minds  as  are  represented  by 


166       Lafcadio  Hearn  in  Japan 

professional  philosophy,  professional  sciences,  not 
to  speak  of  art  and  music,  the  differences  of 
personality  are  so  great  that  you  will  not  find 
any  two  professors  of  these  subjects  thinking  in 
exactly  the  same  way ;  and  unity  of  opinion  upon 
any  subject,  becomes  extremely  difficult  among 
them.  We  therefore  must  come  to  the  conclusion 
that  .personality  especially  belongs  to  the  highest 
range  of  intellectual  culture  and  of  emotional 
sensibility.  I  need  not  insist  upon  its  importance 
to  literature.  The  classical  school  has  always 
championed  impersonality ;  the  romantic  school 
has  always  been  the  highest  expression  of  per 
sonality. 

And  this  is  the  reason  why  I  think  that  it  is 
quite  legitimate  to  express  my  own  preference 
and  sympathy  for  the  romantic  tradition.  It  was 
this  tradition  which  really  produced  every  great 
change  for  the  better  in  every  literature.  It  was 
this  school  of  personality  ;  and  personality  in  its 
highest  forms  signifies  genius.  Out  of  all  the 
glorious  names  on  the  roll  of  European  literature 
you  will  find  that  a  vast  majority  are  names  of 
romanticists.  I  do  not  deny  that  there  are  not 
some  great  English  names  and  French  names  and 
German  names  representing  classicism.  But  the 
romantic  names  only  take  very  highest  rank  in 
the  history  of  these  literatures.  I  might  cite  50 
names  by  way  of  illustration  ;  but  I  imagine  that 
this  would  be  unnecessary.  Let  me  only  remind 
you  of  what  the  iQth  century  represents  in  English 
literature.  There  is  not  a  single  poet  of  impor-t 


Appendix  167 


ance  belonging  to  the  classic  school  in  the  real 
sense  of  the  word.  The  first  groups  of  great 
poets  are  all  of  them  romanticists, —  Wordsworth, 
Coleridge,  and  Southey ;  Byron  <  classical  by 
form  at  times,  yet  altogether  romantic  in  feeling 
and  expression),  Shelley,  and  Keats  ; — Tennyson, 
Swinburne,  Rossetti,  Browning  ; — even  Mathew 
Arnold,  in  spite  of  classical  training,  yielded  to 
romantic  tendencies.  Or  go  back  to  the  i8th 
century, — the  very  age  of  classicism.  There 
you  have  indeed  two  great  classic  figures  in 
poetry,  Dryden  and  Pope ;  but  I  should  doubt 
very  much  whether  these  could  justly  be  es 
timated  at  the  level  of  Gray,  Cowper,  Burns, 
or  even  in  some  respects  with  Blake.  And  a 
greater  poetical  influence  than  any  of  the  classic 
schools  really  wielded  was  exerted  In  the  close  of 
the  century  by  the  work  of  Scott,  Wordsworth, 
and  Coleridge.  Even  among  the  writers  of  the 
early  part  of  the  iQth  century  the  only  poet  of 
classical  sympathies,  Byron,  is  the  only  poet 
whose  work  seems  likely  to  disappear  from 
memory ;  and  whatever  of  it  may  survive  is 
certainly  that  part  which  shows  least  sympathy 
with  classic  tradition  of  any  sort. 

On  the  other  hand,  though  the  romantic  spirit 
has  produced  almost  all  the  great  works  of 
English  literature,  from  Shakespeare  onward, — 
and  although  there  appears  every  possible  reason 
for  giving  all  our  sympathies  to  it,  since  it  repre 
sents  supreme  genius  in  its  highest  expression, — 
it  certainly  has  its  dangers.  The  great  genius 


168       Lafcadio  Hearn  in  Japan 

can  afford  to  dispense  with  any  discipline  which 
impedes  its  activity  :  it  can  be  excused  for  the 
breaking  of  rules,  because  it  has  something  better 
to  give  in  return  for  what  it  breaks.  But  every 
man  is  not  a  genius,  half  a  dozen  men  out  of  a  mil 
lion  perhaps  represents  the  likely  proportion.  So 
that  a  great  multitude  of  writers,  without  genius, 
even  without  marked  ability  of  any  kind,  may  do 
much  mischief  by  following  the  example  of  a 
genius  in  breaking  rules,  without  being  able  to 
atone  for  this  temerity  by  producing  any  thing 
of  a  respectable  order.  The  fact  is  that  thousands 
of  young  men  in  Europe  want  to  be  romanticists, 
merely  because  romanticism  represents  for  them 
the  direction  of  the  least  resistance.  Even  to  do 
any  thing  according  to  classic  rules  requires  con 
siderable  litarary  training  and  literary  patience. 
And  these  men  forget  that  the  great  romanticists 
have  mostly  been  men  who,  although  breakers  of 
rules,  could  make  new  rules  of  their  own.  I  mean 
that  in  Europe,  at  present,  both  in  France  and  In 
England  the  romantic  tendency  is  to  throw  all 
rules  aside  without  reason,  and  without  good  re 
sult.  The  persons  who  wish  to  do  this,  mistake 
selfish  license  for  romance  and  they  can  only 
succeed  in  bringing  about  a  general  degradation 
of  literature.  When  that  comes  it  will  evidently 
be  almost  the  duty  of  every  lover  of  good  litera 
ture  to  help  a  classic  reaction,  because  a  classic 
reaction  is  the  only  possible  remedy  for  literary 
decadence  through  license.  On  the  other  hand, 
a  romantic  reaction  is  the  only  possible  remedy 


Appendix  169 


when  too  much  classic  discipline  has  brought 
about  a  petrifaction  or  stagnation  of  literary 
utterance  of  emotion — as  happened  in  the  mid 
dle  of  the  1 8th  century.  So  you  will  see  that 
the  same  man  might  well  consistently  be  at  one 
period  of  his  life  in  favor  of  classicism,  and  at 
another  in  favor  of  romanticism.  You  will  un 
derstand  clearly  hereafter  what  I  mean  by  these 
terms  in  a  general  way.  And  as  for  what  they 
may  signify  in  the  literature  of  your  own 
country,  you  are  much  more  competent  to  judge 
than  I. 


II 


FAREWELL  ADDRESS 

Now  that  the  term  comes  to  a  ^iose,  I  think 
that  it  would  be  well  to  talk  about  the  possible 
value  of  the  studies  which  we  have  made  together, 
in  relation  to  Japanese  literature.  For,  as  I  have 
often  said,  the  only  value  of  foreign  literary  studies 
to  you  (using  the  word  literary  in  the  artistic 
sense)  must  be  that  of  their  effect  upon  you  own 
capacity  to  make  literature  in  your  own  tougue. 
Just  as  a  Frenchman  does  not  write  English 
books  or  German,  French  books  — except  in  the 
way  of  scientific  treatise — so  the  Japanese  scholar 
who  makes  literature  will  not  waste  time  by  at 
tempting  to  make  it  in  another  language  than  his 
own.  And  as  his  own  is  so  very  differently 
constructed  in  all  respects  from  any  European 
language,  he  can  scarcely  hope  to  obtain  much 
in  the  way  of  new  form  from  the  study  of 
French  or  English  or  German.  So  I  think  that 
we  may  say  the  chief  benefit  of  these  studies  to 
you  must  be  in  thought,  imagination,  and  feeling. 
From  Western  thought  and  imagination  and  feel 
ing,  very  much  indeed  can  be  obtained  which 
will  prove  a  source  of  enriching  and  strengthening 
the  Japanese  literature  of  the  future.  It  is  by 
such  studies  that  all  Western  languages  obtain — 
and  obtain  continually — new  life  and  strength; 


Appendix  171 


English  literature  owes  something  to  almost  every 
other  literature,  not  only  in  Europe,  but  in 
any  civilized  country.  The  same  can  be  said  of 
French  and  German  literature — perhaps  also, 
though  in  less  degree,  of  modern  Italian.  But 
notice  that  the  original  plant  is  not  altered  by 
this  new  sap :  it  is  only  made  stronger  and  able 
to  bear  finer  flowers.  As  English  literature  re 
mains  essentially  English  in  spite  of  the  richness 
gained  from  all  other  literatures,  so  should 
future  Japanese, — literature  ever  remain  purely 
Japanese  no  matter  how  much  benefit  it  may 
obtain  from  the  ideas  and  the  arts  of  the  West. 
If  you  were  to  ask  me  whether  I  know  ot  any 
great  change  so  far  effected,  I  fear  that  I  should 
be  obliged  to  say  no.  Up  to  the  present  I  think 
that  there  has  been  a  great  deal  of  translation 
and  imitation  and  adaptation  into  Japanese  from 
Western  literature ;  but  I  do  not  think  that 
there  has  been  what  we  call  true  assimilation. 
Literature  must  be  creative ;  and  borrowing, 
or  adapting  material  in  the  raw  state — none  of 
this  is  creative.  Yet  it  is  natural  that  things 
should  be  so.  This  is  the  period  ot  assimila 
tion.  Later  on  the  fine  result  will  show — when 
all  this  foreign  material  has  been  transmuted, 
within  the  crucible  of  literature  into  purely 
Japanese  materials.  But  this  can  not  be  done 
quickly. 

Now  I  want  to  say  something  about  the  man 
ner  in  which  1  imagine  that  these  changes,  and 
a  new  literature  must  come  about.  I  believe 


172       Lafcadio  Hearn  in  Japan 

that  there  will  have  to  be  a  romantic  move 
ment  in  Japan,  of  a  much  more  deep-reaching 
kind  than  may  now  appear  credible.  I  think  that 
— to  say  the  strongest  thing  first — the  language 
of  scholarship  will  have  to  be  thrown  away  for 
the  purposes  of  creative  art.  I  think  that  a  time 
must  come  when  the  scholar  will  not  be  ashamed 
to  write  in  the  language  of  the  common  people, 
to  make  it  the  vehicle  of  his  best  and  strongest 
thought  to  enter  into  competition  with  artists 
who  would  now  be  classed  as  uneducated,  per 
haps  even  vulgar  men.  Perhaps  it  will  seem  a 
strange  thing  to  say— yet  I  think  that  there  is  no 
doubt  about  it.  Very  probably  almost  any  univer 
sity  scholar,  consciously  or  unconsciously,  despises 
the  colloquial  art  ot  the  professional  story-teller, 
and  the  writer  of  popular  plays  in  popular  speech. 
Nevertheless,  if  we  can  judge  at  all  by  the  history 
of  literary  evolution  in  other  countries,  it  is  the 
despised  drama  and  despised  popular  story  and 
the  vulgar  song  of  people  which  will  prove  the 
sources  of  future  Japanese  literature — and  a 
finer  literature  than  any  which  has  hitherto  been 
produced. 

I  have  not  the  lightest  doubt  that  Shakeapeare 
was  considered  very  vulgar  in  the  time  when  he 
wrote  his  plays — at  least  by  common  opinion. 
There  were  a  few  men  intelligent  enough  to  feel 
that  his  work  was  more  alive  than  any  other 
drama  of  the  time.  But  these  were  exceptional 
men.  And  you  know  that  in  the  i8th  century 
the  classical  spirit  was  just  as  strong  in  England 


Appendix  173 


as  it  is  now,  or  has  been,  in  Japan.  The 
reproach  of  the  "  vulgar  " — I  mean  the  reproach 
of  vulgarity  would  have  been  brought  in  Pope's 
time  against  any  body  who  should  have  tried  to 
write  in  the  forms  which  we  now  know  to  be 
much  superior.  I  have  told  you  also  how  the 
great  literatures  of  France  and  Germany  were 
obliged  to  pass  though  a  revolution  against 
classical  forms — which  revolution  brought  into 
existence  the  most  glorious  work,  both  in  poetry 
and  prose,  that  either  country  ever  produced. 

But  remember  how  this  revolution  began  to 
work  in  all  these  countries  of  the  West  It 
began  with  a  careful  and  loving  study  of  the 
despised  oral  literature  of  the  common  people. 
It  meant  the  descent  of  a  great  scholar  from 
his  throne  of  learning  to  mix  with  peasants  and 
ignorant  people,  to  speak  th'eir  dialect,  to  sym 
pathize  with  their  simple,  but  deep  and  true 
emotions.  I  do  not  mean  that  the  scholar  went 
to  live  in  a  farmhouse,  or  to  share  the  poverty 
and  misery  of  the  wretched  in  great  cities  :  I 
mean  only  he  descended  to  them  in  spirit  and 
in  heart — sympathized  with  them — learned  to 
conquer  his  prejudices — learned  to  love  them  for 
simple  goodness  and  simple  truth  in  their  un 
educated  natures.  I  think  1  told  you  before, 
that  even  at  one  period  of  old  Greek  literature, 
the  Greeks  had  to  do  something  of  very  nearly 
the  same  kind.  So  I  say  that,  in  my  humble 
opinion,  a  future  literature  in  this  country  must 
be  more  or  less  founded  upon  a  sympathy  with 


174      Lafcadio  Hearn  in  Japan 

and  a  love  for  the  common  ignorant  people — the 
great  mass  of  the  national  humanity.  Now  let 
me  try  to  explain  how  and  why  these  things 
have  come  to  pass  in  almost  every  civilized 
country.  The  natural  tendency  of  society  is  to 
produce  classic  distinction  ;  and  everywhere  the 
necessary  tendency  in  the  highest  classes  must  be 
to  conservatism — elegant  conservatism.  Conser 
vatism  and  exclusiveness  have  their  values  ;  and 
I  do  not  mean  to  suggest  the  least  disrespect 
toward  them.  But  the  conservatism  invariably 
tends  to  fixity,  to  mannerism,  to  a  hard  crystal 
lization.  The  rule  at  length  in  refined  society 
obliges  every  body  to  do  and  say  according  to 
rule — to  express  or  to  repress  thought  and  feeling 
in  the  same  way.  Of  course  men's  hearts  can 
not  be  entirely  changed  by  rule ;  but  such  a 
tyranny  of  custom  can  be  made  that  everybody 
is  afraid  to  express  a  thought  or  to  utter  feeling 
in  a  really  natural  way.  When  life  becomes 
intensely  artificial,  severely  conventional,  literature 
begins  to  die.  Then,  Western  experience  shows 
that  there  is  nothing  can  bring  back  the  failing 
life  except  a  frank  return  to  the  unconventional 
— a  frank  return  to  the  life  and  thought  of  the 
common  people,  who  represent  after  all  the  soil 
from  which  everything  human  springs.  When 
a  language  becomes  hopelessly  petrified  by  rules, 
it  can  be  softened  and  strengthened  and  vivified 
by  taking  it  back  to  its  real  source — we  speak 
of  the  people — and  soaking  it  there  as  in  a  bath. 
Everywhere  this  necessity  has  shown  itself; 


Appendix  175 


everywhere  it  has  been  resisted  with  all  the 
strength  of  pride  and  prejudices  ;  but  everywhere 
it  has  been  the  same.  French  or  German  or 
English  alike — after  having  exhausted  all  the 
resources  of  scholarship  to  perfect  literature — 
have  found  literature  beginning  to  dry  and  wither 
in  their  hands  ;  and  have  been  obliged  to  remove 
it  from  the  atomosphere  of  the  schools  and  to 
resurrect  it  by  means  of  the  literature  of  the 
ignorant.  As  this  has  happened  everywhere  else, 
I  can  not  help  believing  that  it  must  happen 
here. 

Yet  do  not  think  that  I  mean  to  speak  at  all 
slightingly  about  the  value  of  exact  learning. 
Quite  the  contrary.  I  hold  that  it  is  the  man  of 
exact  learning  who  best  can — providing  that  he 
has  a  sympathetic  nature — master  to  good  result 
the  common  speech  and  the  unlettered  poetry. 
A  Cambridge  education,  for  example,  did  not 
prevent  Tennyson  from  writing  astonishing  ballads 
or  popular  poems  in  ballad  measure  in  the 
different  dialects  of  the  Northern  English  peasant. 
Indeed  in  English  literature  the  great  romantic 
reformers  were  all,  or  nearly  all  well-schooled  men, 
but  they  were  men  who  had  artistic  spirit  enough 
to  conquer  the  prejudices  with  which  they  were 
born  and  without  heeding  the  mockery  of  their 
own  class,  bravely  work  to  extract  from  simple 
peasant  love  those  fresh  beauties  which  give  such 
durable  qualities  to  Victorian  poetry.  Indeed, 
some  went  further— Walter  Scott,  for  example, 
who  rode  about  the  country,  going  into  the 


176       Lafcadio  Hearn  in  Japan 

houses  of  the  poorest  people,  eating  with  them 
and  drinking  with  them,  and  everywhere  coaxing 
them  to  sing  him  a  song  or  to  tell  him  a  little 
story  of  the  past.  I  suppose  there  were  many 
people  who  would  then  have  laughed  at  Scott. 
But  those  little  peasant  songs  thus  picked  out 
became  the  new  English  poetry.  The  whole 
lyrical  tone  of  the  iQth  century  was  changed  by 
them.  Therefore  I  should  certainly  venture  to 
hope  that  there  yet  may  be  a  Japanese  Walter 
Scott,  whose  learning  will  not  prevent  him  from 
sympathizing  with  the  unlearned.  Now  I  have 
said  quite  enough  on  that  subject,  and  I  have 
ventured  it  only  through  a  sense  of  duty.  The 
rest  of  what  I  have  to  say  refers  only  to  litreary 
working. 

I  suppose  that  most  of  you,  on  leaving  the 
university,  will  step  into  some  profession  likely 
to  absorb  a  great  deal  of  your  time.  Under  these 
circumstances,  many  a  young  man  who  loves 
literature  resigns  himself  foolishly  to  give  up  his 
pleasures  in  that  direction;  such  young  scholars 
imagine  that  they  have  no  time  now  for  poetry 
or  romance  or  drama, — nor  even  for  much  private 
study.  I  think  that  this  is  a  very  great  mistake, 
and  that  it  is  the  busy  man  who  can  best  give 
us  new  literature,  with  the  solitary  exception, 
perhaps,  of  poetry ;  great  poetry  requires  idleness, 
and  much  time  for  solitary  thinking.  But  in 
other  departments  of  literature  I  can  assure  you 
that  the  world's  men  of  letters  throughout  the 
West  have  been,  and  still  are,  to  a  great  extent, 


Appendix  177 


very  busy  men.  Some  are  in  the  Government 
service,  some  in  the  post  office,  some  in  the  army 
and  navy  (and  you  know  how  busy  military  and 
naval  officers  have  to  be);  some  are  bankers,  judges, 
consuls,  governors  of  provinces,  even  merchants 
— though  these  are  few.  The  fact  is  that  it  is 
almost  impossible  for  anybody  to  live  merely  by 
producing  fine  literature,  and  that  the  literary 
man  must  have,  in  most  cases,  an  occupation. 
Every  year  the  necessity  for  this  becomes  greater. 
But  the  principle  of  literary  work  is  really  not 
to  do  much  at  one  time,  but  to  do  a  very  little 
at  regular  intervals.  I  doubt  whether  any  of  you 
can  never  be  so  busy  that  you  will  not  be  able 
to  spare  20  minutes  or  half  an  hour  in  the  course 
of  one  day  to  literarure.  Even  if  you  should 
give  only  10  minutes  a  day,  that  will  mean  a 
great  deal  at  the  end  of  the  year.  Put  it  in 
another  way,  can  you  not  write  five  lines  of 
literary  work  daily  ?  If  you  can,  the  question 
of  being  busy  is  settled  at  once.  Multiply  three 
hundred  and  sixty- five  by  five.  That  means 
a  very  respectable  amount  of  work  in  twelve 
months.  How  much  better  if  you  could  de 
termine  to  write  20  or  30  lines  everyday.  I 
hope  that  if  any  of  you  really  love  literature, 
you  will  remember  these  few  words  and  never 
think  yourselves  too  busy  to  study  a  little — even 
though  it  be  only  for  ten  or  fifteen  minutes  every 
day.  And  now  good-bye. 


FOURTEEN  DAY  USE 

RETURN  TO  DESK  PROM  WHICH  BORROWED 


LD  21-100W-2  '55 
(Bl39s22)476' 


General  Library 

University  of  California 

Berkeley 


U.  C.  BERKELEY  LIBRARIES 


CDS13fl7DDfl 


^ 


UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA  LIBRARY 


